


clarity

by skylights



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Realities, Cats are also involved, Comes with art!, Emotional Constipation, Fluff, M/M, More attempts at witty dialogue, Or should we say attempts at romance, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 17:17:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5833957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skylights/pseuds/skylights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well as a general rule, one person usually wants to spend time with another because he or she would like to know more about that person in question.” Bond shrugs, nonchalant in the face of Q’s eyeroll. “Also, most people would consider it to be enjoyable as well, to have food in the process.”</p><p>“A very succinct and completely unnecessary introduction to Social Interactions 101, thank you, but you know damn well what I mean.”</p><p>“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Which is another reason why this upcoming dinner is so important.” </p><p>(Or, the one with mirrors, meals, and an attempted romance. It's just a coincidence that Q has loved Bond in almost every life he's lived.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/gifts).
  * Inspired by [reflection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5833894) by [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/pseuds/beili). 



> All the love to [beili](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beili) for being the most patient, most amazing artist ever. <3 This fic definitely wouldn't be here without the wonderful inspiration of your art and input – especially with the cats! It was so wonderful to work with you, and I can't thank you enough for all your enthusiasm and kindness (+ extreme tolerance with my tardiness, eep). 
> 
> Everyone please go look at and give many, many deserved kudos/comments on the absolutely gorgeous work that [beili](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beili) has done for this fic [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5833894). 
> 
> Last but not least, shoutout to Lisa for the last minute beta :3 I don't know where I'd be without you, honestly.

 

>   
>  **The first** time they meet, he is nothing more than a name on a page and a whisper in the corridors, an open secret being passed from one person to the next. A cautionary tale, perhaps, one that might even taste like regret if Q lets the words linger in his mouth for too long.
> 
> _Did you know?_
> 
> _Did you hear about it?_
> 
> Q is not yet Q at this point, and the constant uniformity of a position instead of a name is not yet as comforting as it will eventually become.
> 
> “A pity, isn’t it?” he says with a generic sort of sympathy whenever the matter comes up in conversation, but in truth, it’s just the standard answer to give for appearance’s sake. Such is the nature of Six, after all. Agents come and agents go. Operatives die in the field all the time.
> 
> In any case, it’s not like Q even knew the man.

 

* * *

 

The air feels closer here, in this part of the world. There’s a heaviness to the wet heat of it, the way every breath feels like a slow, sultry kiss that leaves his skin sweat-damp and sticky with dirt and dust, streaks of city grime that sink in so far, Bond has to stand for long minutes under the splutter of his hotel shower each night just scrubbing his collarbones clean.

It’s not all bad, though.

If the wind blows in just right, sometimes Bond thinks he can taste the tang of sea salt underneath it all, an echo of the ocean lying low under the smell of traffic fumes and tropical heat. The Pearl of the Orient may be grubbier than ever these days, but Penang still stubbornly clings to its own fair share of old-world charm, small bastions of heritage tucked away in plain sight all around the island.

On Burma Road, sun-weathered rickshaws wreathed in Christmas lights try to woo the tourists that stumble from one Starbucks to another, while deeper in the heart of Georgetown – that bustling, traffic choked epicentre – boutique hotels have set up shop in the midst of old colonial plantations, Anglo-Malay bungalows housing guests who will pay good money to sip tea on their restored verandahs.

You could have bought bales of Chinese silk with Spanish silver here once, or traded ships of rosewood chinoiserie for spices and slaves, chests of gunpowder for crates of tea and piculs of opium.

These days though, business on the island is a more straightforward thing:

“Quality products for you, mister? Bag? Belt?” The man at the roadside stall is wearing a gap-toothed grin as he sidles up close to Bond, belts strung over one arm and knockoff wallets fanned out in his hand. “You first customer tonight so I give you good price, okay?”

“Only good, not the best?” Bond tacks on a smile for good measure and picks a wallet at random, this turning out to be a fake Louis Vuitton. Charming. “How much for this?”

“Ninety only, sir. Very good quality, AA-grade.”

“No discount? Forty five, maybe forty?”

If the look on the stall-owner’s face is anything to go by, Bond isn’t haggling as much as he is committing something akin to a moral outrage, the other man shaking his head in disapproval as he deftly plucks the wallet from Bond’s hand.

“You learn to bargain from Chinese, is it?” he chides, quite uncaring of the fact that he himself is as Chinese as they come. “Cheapest already, I give you. Seventy-five, okay? Seventy-five?” This suggestion is punctuated with an emphatic jab at the wallet in question. “Best price, mister. Nowhere cheaper, I guarantee.”

Not that any of this means anything to Bond, who grudgingly resigns himself to settling into his gullible white tourist persona for a while longer. He would have expected this to get easier as the day wore on, but now, watching Baharom take his time to potter idly around a display of local sweetmeats after a full eight hours of tailing him in humid, 33ºC heat, all Bond wants to do at this point is yell at the man in question and drag him into a nearby alleyway to do things the old-fashioned way.

The thing is, less than a decade ago, Bond could have easily gotten away with exactly that. A few choice words, a well-placed gun to the head, no fuss. Lately though, Six has taken to showing an annoying preference for playing a more… delicate hand, if you will, especially when it comes to preventive measures such as these.

Personally, Bond thinks that the word _blackmail_ sounds so much nicer in the way it rolls off the tongue, but then again, who is he to question whatever it is they want to write into the header of his mission reports? It’s all the same to Bond, anyways, whether this is called _Preventive Measure M03_ , or simply _A Bloody Big Waste of Time and Resources._

“No?” asks the stall-owner with a look of long-suffering after Bond has picked up, contemplated, and ultimately rejected yet another one of his products. “No good for you, mister? Something else?”

The last thing that Bond wants to do right now is inspect yet another faux-leather wallet of questionable origin, but as long as Baharom lingers here, inspect Bond must. So:

“Maybe–,” he is just starting to say with the last vestiges of his enthusiasm when his mobile begins to buzz, Bond quickly fishing the burner out of his trouser pocket with a sense of thankfulness he never thought he’d come to associate with Six. “Yes, dearest?” he says smoothly as the stall-owner slinks away, muttering darkly under his breath about _ang moh_ tourists and their ilk.

On the line, there’s a moment of silence from Q as he regroups.

“I’ve been advised that you usually have your reasons–,” he eventually says after a pointed clearing of his throat, “–but Bond, I do hope you’re aware that you’re about to be dangerously behind schedule?”

Bond glances at Baharom in the near distance, still trying to decide between one type of miniature coconut tarts and another.

“Quite aware of that, darling, but you know how the traffic up here can be absolutely horrendous at this time of the day. You’re not in a rush for me to get back, are you?”

“On the contrary,” comes the dry reply. Q might be one and a half continents away, but Bond finds that he has no problem whatsoever trying to imagine the unamusement that must be gracing Q’s face right now, the equal parts of exasperation and disgruntlement that he’s come to be oh so familiar with over the past year or so. “You can stay on that end of the world as long as you like, but seeing how there’s only another twenty minutes before the sedative kicks in, I’d strongly suggest that you somehow start herding him towards the location as planned. Unless, of course, you fancy rifling through his pockets while he’s passed out on the kerbside.”

“Not at all. Would you like me to pick up anything in the meantime?”

It doesn’t even take any imagination on Bond’s part to conjure up the way Q must be pinching the bridge of his nose at this stage, the telltale long exhale that often accompanies it filtering down the connection.

“Since you’re asking, the pendrive and all its contents in a timely fashion will be most welcome.” A slight pause here, as Q takes a moment to consider the rest. “Also–,” he adds after a beat, “–a week-long paid holiday wouldn’t go amiss, along with agents who actually know better than to inconvenience an entire branch because of poor time management.”

“It’s the traffic, darling, nothing much I can do about it.”

On the phone, Q makes a scoffing sound that Bond finds himself smiling ever so slightly at.

All things considered, it’s hardly the most appropriate of reactions to have when being chided by one’s quartermaster, but then again, it’s not like Bond has ever been the most appropriate of agents.

“Well–,” sighs Q in what sounds suspiciously like resignation, “–traffic or no traffic, please know that the many people who are staying through lunch to see this mission through will greatly appreciate it if you wrap things up within the hour.”

“Apologies, darling. I’ll take you out to a nice dinner to make up for it when I get back.”

“Please don’t,” comes the brusque reply. “Just the pendrive will do, thank you.”

“Alright then, I’ll keep that in mind. Love you.”

The pause on Q’s end of the line is a long one, and while Bond fully expects a curt, parting earful about workplace harassment seminars being scheduled for his benefit in the near future, all he gets in the end is the dial tone, Q having hung up without so much as a _love you too_ , or the more expected _you’re a bloody nuisance and an embarrassment to the agency, Bond._

Well then.

“You want nice handbag also?” pipes the stall-owner from where he had been hovering just within earshot. “Purse for your girlfriend, mister? Wife?”

Bond slides the mobile back into his pocket with a plastered-on smile.

“Neither, I’m afraid.”

There’s a flash of misunderstanding on the other man’s face and when he laughs, clapping Bond heartily on the back (“You’re a smart man, sir, very smart, very lucky.”) in misplaced commendation, all Bond can do is laugh right along with him.

 

* * *

 

It’s nearing 10:15pm by the time Baharom finally deigns to leave the biscuits alone and amble down the street towards where the strip of massage parlours begin, Bond reluctantly letting himself be accosted by sleepy-eyed promoters promising the best values in town as he watches Baharom steal into one of the dimly-lit storefronts for his usual appointment.

Another few minutes, then, before Baharom is settled into his room and Bond can be rid of all this skulking around.

It hadn’t taken much effort on Six’s part to have a local contact quietly negotiate a deal with the parlour’s proprietors, and in return for a not inconsiderable amount of of money, Six had secured a guarantee that no customers would be on-premise when Baharom arrived, all staff in turn taking a very convenient thirty-minute smoke break out in the back alley once Baharom had been led to his private room.

“This is a bloody lot of effort just to stock our coffers with more naughty photos of politicians with their pants down, isn’t it?” With his mobile pressed against the curve of his shoulder, Bond has both hands free to carefully rummage through the satchel that Baharom had been carrying, so far only coming up with the netbook that the USB drive is supposedly paired to and nothing else. “Honestly, we couldn’t have gotten one of the junior agents to do this?”

“Contrary to what the double-oh department might have you lot believing, not every mission has to involve gunfights and explosions. Also–,” Q pauses to huff a small sigh, Bond thinking just a bit fondly of the way Q must now be pinching the bridge of his nose in quiet exasperation, “–did you really have to call before you’ve even found the USB drive? Is there a point to this, Bond, or did you just fancy a nice chat right in the middle of an operation?”

“What, a man can’t have some company while he works?” Shifting a little on his knees, Bond runs his fingers along the inner lining of Baharom’s bag for a second time, only to still frustratingly come up with nothing. Bollocks.

“Any agent who’s been sent halfway around the world on agency funds to secure some very delicate materials for the benefit of British intelligence would _not_ call back to base with frivolities, no.”

“Shouldn’t and wouldn’t. Vastly different things. Also, I’d hardly call photos of the deputy prime minister sticking his–”

“ _Bond_.”

“I have a very valid point there and you know it.”

At this stage, Bond has taken to sitting back on his haunches as he contemplates Baharom’s hefty, passed-out figure with mild irritation. If the drive isn’t in the bag, common sense means that Baharom is mostly likely wearing the damned thing somewhere on his vile, portly person, which in turn means that Bond now has to face the unpleasant task of patting Baharom down in all the usual places that people tend to hide things.

“This is pointless,” Q says shortly just as Bond is getting to it. “Why don’t you just call me back when you’ve actually found the bloody thing?”

“Are you trying to insinuate that talking to you is a waste of time, Q?” Bond tsks, disapproving. “Because I assure you, it’s anything but.”

While the sound that Q makes at this is primarily one of vexation, there’s still a touch of amusement lingering underneath it as well, no real bite to the way that Q follows it up with a lofty “Why bother insinuating when I can just outright say that _you_ are the one wasting _my_ time?”

“And yet you haven’t hung up,” Bond muses.

Right before Q can snap a reply though, the telltale outline of a pouch hidden behind the elastic waistband of Baharom’s pants reveals itself, Bond needing to suppress a groan at its unfortunate location.

“Not that you’ll have to hang up anything soon–,” he adds quickly before Q decides to do exactly that, “–given that I’ve found the bloody thing.”

“Well thank god for that.”

“If you didn’t want to hang up so soon, you could have just told me, Q. No–” A small grimace here as Bond gingerly retrieves the drive, “–shame in being a bit more open with your feelings.”

Because Q is apparently a soulless automaton, he doesn’t even bother glorifying this suggestion with an answer, leaving Bond to reflect on how the distant sound of Q’s disapproving sigh is just as satisfying as the knowledge that he can now remove his hand from the inside of Baharom’s pants.

 

* * *

 

“You know,” Q says almost as an afterthought after Bond has forced Baharom’s eyelid open for the third time. “You don’t actually have to stay on the phone for this. It’s not like there aren’t prompts on-screen telling you what to do so I can access each file. Also, thumbprint again please, if you don’t mind.”

“Don’t you like having company while you work?” Bond makes a grab for Baharom’s slightly greasy hand, wincing when he has to wipe the man’s thumb off on the upholstery of the chair before the netbook’s biometric scanner will acknowledge it. “I know I do.”

“As you’ve so kindly informed me earlier. In any case, I’ll pass the word on to your next handler; they’ll be more than delighted to know that you’d like them to call in and check up on you more often from now on.”

When Bond unceremoniously drops Baharom’s hand back onto his lap, it’s accompanied by a sound of disappointment.

“Q,” he says in mock hurt. “Here I was thinking that you’d know that when I say company, I actually mean _your_ company. You don’t think that we make a good team?”

“Ha bloody ha, pull the other while you’re at it, will you?”

“You wound me, you really do.”

“And I’m sure you’ve had much worse come your way,” Q snipes back with vague disinterest over the sound of his typing. “Now if you can manage one more retinal scan for me, we can pack this up and I’ll start trying to forget everything I absolutely did _not_ need to know about the private lives of certain Southeast Asian politicans. Are you still good for time on your end?”

Bond, balancing the netbook in one hand and trying to reposition Baharom’s head with his other, can only grunt for the time being.

“Five minutes,” he finally says after the netbook has beeped its assent. “Five minutes before the staff should return and another seven before Baharom wakes up, but not a hard estimate on both.”

“Excellent, just don’t remove our own USB drive before I say so and I should have you out in three.”

On-screen, programs are already beginning to close in quick succession, Q scrubbing every last trace of him ever having been in the system until Bond is left once again with the netbook’s generic desktop background and the unsavoury prospect of needing to return everything to their original places.

“Are you done?” Bond is eying Baharom with trepidation, the netbook still humming as it starts to power down. “Four and six minutes left respectively, but really, don’t rush on my account.”

“Done. Now put everything back, get out, and I’ll see… to the de-briefing documents on my end.”

The pause is barely perceptible, Bond honestly having only caught it because he had been listening with just the right amount of attention at the right time.

Anyone and anywhere else, he would have let it go as just another linguistic slip or a split-second decision to swap one word out for another, but with Q, Bond thinks he can afford to wonder. There’s no harm after all, in having a minor indulgence every now and then.

“Noted,” Bond says in return, and in another life, Q doesn’t hang up straight away.

Instead, the words _I’ll see you soon_ would have been the ones that rolled off the tip of his tongue, easy, but here and now, in this particular version of events, all Bond gets is just the dial tone again.

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  **The second** time they meet, Q is watching from the sidelines, another person in the room when he goes into cardiac arrest and another breath held when the stats don’t come back online. Another breath released, when they do.
> 
> “Bloody hell,” one of the other techs murmurs under his breath. “Fucking double-oh agents walking off potential heart failure. That’s field-work for you, eh?”
> 
> Q can only nod in silent agreement because they’ve met, this time around, but merely in passing. Small smiles of polite acknowledgement in the hallway leading up to Boothroyd’s office, for instance, or those brief moments across the returns table when Q trades professional _thank you_ s for used guns.
> 
> _He’s gorgeous,_ Q remembers thinking then, _but only in the way dangerous things in the distance are._
> 
> It’s the sound of her voice that brings him back, the crowd in front of the monitors parting at her arrival, and it must have been more serious than they previously thought, if M herself deigns to come down here.
> 
> “Dr. Bhattacharjee, my office with double-oh seven’s diagnostics if you’ll please,” she finally says, curt. “And from you–” She rounds onto poor Notley then, who’s still looking a bit pale around the gills from having helped talk an agent back from certain death, “–I want a full report for the car as well. The incompetence might not have killed him, but when he gets back, I might just be tempted to finish the job myself. A cock-up like this can’t happen again.”
> 
> Except, he doesn’t come back, and a cock-up like this does happen again, because such is the nature of Six.
> 
> Boothroyd names Q as his successor in the springtime of the following year and somewhere during the tail-end of March, a postcard from Venice finds its way onto the incoming tray of Q’s document rack.
> 
> _Congratulations_ , it simply says. _Regards, J & V._
> 
> Her name is Vesper, Q learns in time, and he hopes that they’re happy together.

 

* * *

 

It had meant to be temporary, this setting up of Q branch underground and far away from the rest of what Bond tends to call civilised society and Q, noise-making annoyances.

While Bond is sure that Churchill’s war-rooms would have been more than perfectly serviceable back during the Second World War, their reappropriation to house Q branch these days just makes the contrast between here and Six’s bright new digs across Vauxhall Bridge all the more obvious, the distinct lack of windows coupled with Q’s tendency to hoard spare machinery making his space feel that much more claustrophobic.

“You know–,” Bond says companionably as he strides across the unpolished cement floor and towards where Q has holed himself up behind an abundance of mechanical bric-a-brac, “–whatever it is that you’ve done to get sent down here, I’m sure M will agree that you’ve more than atoned for it by now.”

“Bond.” Sitting at his work table, Q doesn’t even bother to spare the other man so much as a glance, far too preoccupied at the moment with scribbling sets of numbers down and checking them against a tablet that’s currently propped up against at least three different textbooks on thermodynamics. “Did you drop by just to insult my workplace again, or is there something I can actually help you with?”

Mindful of how Q isn’t paying him the slightest attention, Bond takes his time in circling slowly towards Q’s table, eventually pausing at one end to pick up a small, half-disassembled motor that had, a mere moment ago, been sitting at the corner closest to Q.

“It was an observation, not an insult,” he says as he turns it over in his hands. “There’s a subtle difference.”

“Is this the part where you tell me that you’ve started to selectively care about semantics again? Or can we skip that bit today and you go directly to telling me what it is you want.”

“Such suspicion,” chides Bond in a wounded tone. “Do I honestly need a reason to come down to see you?”

“Yes, you do.” Jabbing at his tablet and swiping between apps, Q has a small furrow starting up between his brows as something appears to not quite add up. “So please, do share, and while you’re at it, much obliged if you’d put that back exactly where you found it, ta.”

Well okay, so maybe Q is paying just a tiny bit of attention, which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t all that bad. It’s still not enough to get Q to look up from his work though, and when Bond tries parking himself in the small space he had inadvertently cleared at the table’s edge, all the reaction he gets is a pointed clearing of Q’s throat.

“ _Exactly_ where you found it,” comes the firm reiteration and fine, Bond can work around that, shifting so that he ends up with the motor in his lap. It’s quite precise since it’s a few inches above where he had picked it up from, but Bond doesn’t think Q will mind too much, what with Q’s new aversion to semantics and all that.

“So,” Bond says cheerfully after Q has thrown a quick, albeit thoroughly unamused glance at his general direction and chosen not to pursue the matter any further. “You wouldn’t happen to have any plans over lunch today, would you?”

This earns him a second, longer, less unamused and more curious glance.

“Should I be asking why? Because if you’re after that exploding pen again, I’m afraid I’ll be extremely busy for most of the foreseeable future.”

“But that does mean you'll be free for any engagements that don’t involve exploding pens, right?” Bond leans in that much closer and at this, Q finally does set his work aside to look up, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose as he does.

“Define engagements,” he says cautiously. “In the event that it's likely to get me fired or placed on a watch list of any kind, I might have just remembered another project that needs working on. Urgently.”

“It's near nothing of that sort, I assure you.” Pushing off from his perch on the table, Bond sets to carefully moving the motor those few precious inches back into its original spot. “That said though—” he adds as he angles the motor just so, “—it _is_ important, and something I absolutely need you around for.”

“Am I supposed to be reassured by that?” Q stands just in time to catch the coat that Bond has taken off the back of a nearby chair and thrown towards him. “And did I even say anything that sounded remotely like an agreement to… whatever this is?”

“It's important,” is all Bond says in cryptic reply. “Also, we can't talk about it here, so put your coat on, please, it’s a bit on the cold side today.”

When Q’s gaze drifts from coat to Bond to work-in-progress, that's the moment that Bond knows he's more or less won, Q needing only that slight, final push.

“Please?” Bond adds and the deed is done, Q sighing in quiet defeat as he shrugs his coat on.

“Fine, fine,” he grumbles under his breath. “But I swear, Bond, it really better be important.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, it takes approximately twenty minutes for Q to cotton on to what Bond has planned, which makes it twenty minutes too late for Q to do anything other than quietly protest as they’re being brought to their table.

“Really?” Q hisses as their server guides them upstairs and away from the main dining hall, the conversations of other noontime diners lightening to a comfortable buzz by the time they reach the first floor. “You drove us out all the way to Covent Garden just so we can have _lunch_?”

“Honestly, two miles is hardly something that deserves to be called ‘all the way’. Also, what’s wrong with lunch?”

“Lunch on its own I have no problem with. I’d even go as far as to say that lunch is more than a perfectly acceptable meal time, but when I’m being _conned_ into one, Bond, that’s when I take an issue with it.”

“I did say I’d buy you dinner when I got back,” Bond points out reasonably. “You may remember that you declined, so here we are, not having dinner. Also–,” he adds smoothly over Q’s looks of utter contempt, “–might I add at this point that if there’s anything you’re going to want to take an issue with, lunchtime traffic in the middle of London makes for a far better candidate than a good meal.”

For a moment, Q looks as if he wants to challenge this bizarre, Bond-ian brand of logic, but when Bond attaches a broad smile onto the back of his reasoning, it’s as if some of the fight goes out of Q, a slow deflation that has Q wearing a expression of resigned annoyance rather than just plain annoyance.

“You’ve put quite a bit of thought into this, haven’t you?” he asks wearily. “Which, mind you, isn’t a compliment at this point.”

“As if you would allow something so frivolous to ever pass your lips,” comes the very serious reply, and if Q throws Bond another one of his many Looks at this, it’s not quite enough to warrant a comeback.

Instead, what Q does is cast a sweeping glance at the dining area that they’ve been left to choose from, eventually settling on and making a beeline for the table nestled in a nearby corner as Bond trails bemusedly after him.

Out of all the other sunlit areas with their mirrored walls and boulangerie-inspired decor, trust Q to still gravitate towards the one place that most resembles the dark hovel of his underground lair. Evidently, you could take the quartermaster out of Q branch, but the reverse didn’t quite hold true.

With Q depositing himself in prime position to face nothing but dark panels of wood, Bond takes it upon himself to slide into the seat facing out towards the rest of the room, quietly aware that he would probably have ended up choosing this exact seat for himself, too, had he been here with anyone else and for any other reason.

As luck would have it though, it really is just lunch with his quartermaster today.

No real need for the ideal vantage point to observe all exits and no point as well, to the non-reflective safety of solid wood all around, no mirrors anywhere near them to give anything away. It’s almost a crying shame, really, and when Bond tells Q as much, all he gets in return is a curious look, tempered with a side of mild amusement.

“So are we regretting not having to worry about our safety as we eat now?” Q asks. “Ready to count this meal as a loss since we aren’t being pursued by hitmen and criminals?”

“It’ll take a lot more than that to count this meal as a loss, trust me.”

If Q makes the mistake of meeting Bond’s gaze and not quite finding what he had been expecting there, it’s with remarkable speed that he diverts his attention to the menus that they’ve just been handed, Q perusing Les Deux Salons’ _prix fixe_ with a little more intensity than strictly necessary.

“The fish is quite good here,” Bond offers companionably. “The skate, especially, or the Dover sole.”

“Oh?”

The nonchalance is a feint, and even if Bond doesn’t comment on it, he does feel quite justified in counting it as the second minor win of the day when Q orders the skate wingmeunière with a slight tinge of pink still colouring the apples of his cheeks.

 

* * *

 

It takes much of the entrée and at least more than a few mouthfuls of the dry, steely Chablis that Bond has ordered for the both of them before Q relaxes enough to hold a conversation that’s not made up entirely of verbal barbs. Why, Bond would go as far as to consider him just about cordial even, by the time the mains arrive.

“Do you usually make it a habit of kidnapping people for lunch?” Q asks offhandedly as he chases a stray caper along the side of his plate, eventually succeeding in spearing it onto the tines of his fork. “Or is it more of an occasional hobby?”

“My preferred meal time actually happens to be dinner, but I do make concessions for the right people. Also–,” Bond gestures at the plates between them, “–you can’t exactly kidnap the willing, can you?”

“Conned, then. Tricked. Deceived.”

“Was there ever a moment where I attempted to mislead you?”

The laugh that Q allows himself is short, one that’s filled with surprise more than anything else.

“Do you want a list? Because I could write one right now on this napkin, but I don’t think even a fraction of it would be able to fit.”

“An amendment, then,” Bond concedes. “Was there ever a moment where I attempted to mislead you _today_?”

Busying himself with cutting up a small piece of the skate and trying to balance another caper atop it, Q seems to ponder this for a moment. “You said there was something important we needed to talk about,” he finally decides on. “But here we are, with still no sign of the matter in question.”

“Only because I haven’t brought it up.”

“Is that so? And when is this mysterious matter of importance going to make an appearance?”

Bond, knowing exactly how frustrating he can be, merely takes pains to look thoughtful.

“That–,” he says after a moment’s consideration, “–would depend on how you feel about dessert.”

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, Q harbours quite an affection towards dessert, Bond needing to pause over his own plate every now and then just to indulge in the sight of Q’s quiet, rapturous delight over the _île flottante_ that the server had recommended.

“You have quite a sweet tooth, don’t you?” he ventures as Q reverently dips his spoon into the last dregs of the custard, the praline-dusted meringue that had been floating atop it having been demolished almost as soon as the dish arrived at the table.

“You noticed?” Q post-dessert is a content, satisfied creature, and even if there’s nothing that can be done about the sarcasm, at least there’s no real sharpness to the lilt of his words. “Goodness, Bond, where would I be without your astute powers of observation?”

“Eating macarons, conquering the world, and continuing on your merry way, I'll warrant.”

Maybe it’s the utter seriousness with which Bond delivers this, or maybe it’s just the temporary sugar high that Q is riding, but when the laugh startles out of Q, it seems to surprise even Q himself.

“Macarons?” he echoes. The tail-ends of a grin are still clinging to the sides of Q’s mouth when he speaks and if Bond has seen Q any more relaxed than this, he doesn’t think he can remember. “Really, Bond? Macarons?”

“Well you can’t conquer the world with fruitcake, can you? Also, I think I should be quite concerned that you prefer to comment on the issue of dessert-types, rather than the more pressing one of impending world domination.”

“Impending being the operative word here,” comes the pointed rebuttal. “I can neither confirm nor deny any plans to establish a benevolent, pastry-based dictatorship.”

“And that, my dear quartermaster, is _exactly_ what a potential dictator might say.”

It’s only a split second delay before the words “Well I did say I’d be benevolent” are out of Q’s mouth with the same amount of lightness as before, but even so, it’s as if a switch has been flipped, a subtle change having happened between one sentence and the next.

If Q had been holding himself with complete ease earlier on, it’s with an added touch of barely-noticeable stiffness that he sits now, back pulled that much straighter and the light in his eyes just a bit more calculating than before.

Bond could kick himself twice over for accidentally bringing Six up, he really could, but what good would that even do?

Slight and unintentional as it had been, the damage is already done, Bond having pried some metaphorical door open with a stupid slip of tongue and helping to usher back in some of the caginess that Q seems so fond of carrying about himself.

“Well then,” Q says after a beat, still deceptively casual from behind the rim of his wineglass. “As unexpectedly enjoyable as this has been, I think it's time we got to the crux of the matter, don't you?”

“The crux?”

“Really, Bond.” The wineglass returns to the table and even if the gesture is brief, it’s an expressive one, encompassing the empty plates and half-finished glasses of wine still sitting between them. “Unless you’re asking me to move heaven and earth and this is supposed to be a last supper of sorts, all of this wasn’t necessary in the slightest.”

“In that case,” Bond says slowly. “You and I seem to have very different views as to what the term ‘necessary’ can be applied to. I, for instance, think that lunch is a very necessary meal, and that having lunch with you is a very necessary thing.”

“Oh come off it.” Still sounding relatively good humoured, Q has leaned back in his seat, a controlled sprawl that’s just the right side of casual. “Enough with the fooling around. I need to be back by 2:45 and it’s not as if we have another course to make small talk through so out with it, Bond, whatever it is that you really want.”

“Want?” echoes Bond. “You think I did all of this because I _want_ something?”

Unperturbed, Q just shrugs. “You didn’t kidnap me and drive us out all the way here for no reason, so of course you want something.”

“Wanting to have a meal with you isn't reason enough?”

The line of Q’s mouth hardens ever so slightly, Q obviously unimpressed that Bond had even considered that very train of thought, let alone pursued it.

“I’m being serious here, Bond,” he says. “Really, I am.”

“Well so am I.”

Searching the sober expression on Q’s face, Bond finds – unexpectedly, inconceivably – that Q truly doesn’t have the faintest clue as to why he’s currently sitting across Bond at a lunch table.

It’s the sort of hard-hitting revelation that makes Bond want to throw his hands up in defeat, but taking another glance at the slowly cooling look on Q’s face, that’s just about enough to help Bond rein the urge in.

“I’m not sure why you find it so difficult to believe–,” he offers when Q doesn’t seem inclined to add to the discussion, “–but I really did just want to have a meal with you.”

“A meal,” Q says flatly. “A meal that you practically conned me into having with you.”

“Midweek lunch between colleagues that admittedly, could have done with less subterfuge,” corrects Bond. “But in my defence, I didn’t think you would have agreed otherwise.”

The look on Q’s face makes Bond think that Q is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but for once, Bond doesn’t actually have anything up his sleeve. No tricks and ploys, no ruses or even a sleight of hand to fill the seconds that keep growing between them. Except–

“So if there’s nothing you want–,” Q eventually says, still doubtful, “–I’m going to assume that this important matter that you’ve been alluding to all this time doesn’t actually exist as well?”

Well, except _that_ , though Bond hesitates to call it a scheme of any sort at this point.

“It actually does–,” he admits before the pause grows long enough for Q to jump to needless conclusions, “–and for the record, I promise you that it won’t be whatever it is you’re starting to think it’s about. Also, it’s still as important as ever.”

“Important enough to warrant all of this?” Still unamused, Q has gone as far as to fold his arms across his chest, as if waiting for the final blow. “Well enlighten me then, of this important matter.”

A steadying breath, some part of Bond wondering if this has been nothing but a spectacularly stupid idea from the very start, but Bond has done stupider things for people who matter less, so: “Will you have dinner with me sometime next week?”

For a few long seconds, Q seems to be frozen in place, as if pinned to his chair by the sheer unexpectedness of Bond’s question. It’s shock first, a flash of it across Q’s face before disbelief takes its place, the wide-open emotion of it shuttered away by the time wariness sinks in and Q has his fingers digging ever so slightly into the flesh of his arms.

“Dinner,” he says tightly. “That was the matter of importance you wanted to speak about.”

“Dinner with you, yes. Are we now on the same page here?” Bond can feel himself leaning across the table, quite unsure of how else to get the point across. “I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe that I don’t actually want some sort of favour from you, but all I want–,” he says very carefully, “–is your time. That’s it. No elaborate schemes. No services. Nothing of that sort.”

“And this–”

“Well I wasn’t going to try and ask you out if you spent most of the meal either glowering or trying to stab me in the neck with a fork, was I?”

By now, some of the tension from before has thankfully eased out of Q, leaving only a flicker of doubt behind.

“Q–,” Bond begins once again, but Q is pulling himself up from his sprawl, straight-backed as he absently adjusts a dessert spoon that doesn’t need any actual adjusting.

“Okay,” he says at length and by now, the spoon is as straight as it'll ever be. “I still can’t fathom why on earth you’d want something like this, but… okay.”

“Well as a general rule, one person usually wants to spend time with another because he or she would like to know more about that person in question.” Bond shrugs, nonchalant in the face of Q’s eyeroll. “Also, most people would consider it to be enjoyable as well, to have food in the process.”

“A very succinct and completely unnecessary introduction to Social Interactions 101, thank you, but you know damn well what I mean.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Which is another reason why this upcoming dinner is so important.”

The last mouthful of Chablis goes down smooth, and not for the first time during this conversation, Bond has to wonder if he should have ordered another glass, never mind how the return of Q’s sarcasm will hopefully signify only good things from here on out.

“Look–,” Bond adds and sets the empty glass aside, “–maybe you won’t believe it until I have you sitting across me at Apsleys or Marcus Wareing sometime next week, but dinner really can just an excuse to try and get to know someone a little better.”

“What's there to know?” As if taking a cue from Bond, Q has reached for his own glass, downing its remains. “I’ll be surprised if you don't already know the contents of my file by now.”

“Then tell me something that's not on your file.”

“So you _do_ admit to hacking into Six’s confidential employee records.” Q huffs a small laugh, Bond wanting to believe that it's because he’s genuinely amused. “Actually no, nevermind, don't tell me, I think I'm better off not knowing.”

“And I think you're purposely trying to avoid the question.”

“There was a question?”

“A request then, if we want to look at the semantics,” concedes Bond. “Something that won't be on the file I might or might not have read.”

As glacier-slow as the increments may have been, Bond still thinks that they’re inching somewhat closer to where they were before, Q slightly more generous with his words and the sound of his voice.

“Well if you've allegedly seen the file, then you'll know how comprehensive it can be. What is it you want to know, Bond? The kind of pets I have? What I watch on the telly?”

The pointed look on Bond’s face is enough to make Q laugh again, out of sheer disbelief and what is by now, definite amusement.

“My god, you’re actually taking this seriously, aren't you?” Q is shaking his head, no doubt having a bit of trouble trying to comprehend the actuality of this. “You're impossible, Bond. Completely and irrevocably impossible.”

“So I've been told. Now if you'll stop stalling, I do believe I asked about pets, first.”

“Really? We’re doing this?”

“A dog?” Across the table, Bond has tilted his head to one side, considering Q with renewed interest. “Actually… no,” he amends slowly. “That doesn't seem quite right. Cat, I think. Cats?”

Q sighs and Bond can't help but smile, knowing the sound of reluctant, yet not completely displeased defeat when he hears it.

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  **The third** time they meet, he is the last of them, a rogue element that has yet to be contained and a mistake that Q knows he won’t have the conscience to make again.
> 
> “You mentioned Bucharest reaching out to you?” Mallory is pale and tired under the artificial lights, run ragged from trying to do a job Q knows he doesn’t actually want to do. None of them want to, honestly, but Six has always been as proud as it is relentless. “Just tell me this isn’t another wild goose chase that we’re being sent on.”
> 
> “It doesn’t appear to be, sir.” Except it is, and Q has lied between his teeth so many times at this point, sometimes it doesn’t even register anymore, his hands steady as ever when he hands the printouts to Mallory. “They think they saw him outside of Comana, heading into Bulgaria and possibly to Istanbul after that.”
> 
> “ _Think_ ,” mutters Mallory under his breath. “This is what we’ve come down to, wasting time and money to chase after shadows in the dark. If we didn’t train him half as well as we did, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.” Disgust warps the hard line of his mouth, and when Mallory glances down at the papers in his hand, Q can’t even be sure that he’s even reading the information on it.
> 
> “Should we notify DANS that he might be coming their way, sir?”
> 
> Mallory looks up, considering. “No,” he decides. “No, this is internal and we’ll make damn sure that it stays that way. I’ll get Moneypenny on it, she’s already in Kosovo as it is.”
> 
> “Sir.”
> 
> Later, when Q waits for the 470 bus to Epsom at Colliers Wood, he will be there. Not outside of Comana, not on-route to Bulgaria, and certainly nowhere near Istanbul. Just Colliers Wood, with his back to the wind and his hands shoved deep into his pockets.
> 
> “You’re aware that every time you do this, you’re committing an act of treason, right?”
> 
> Amused, as usual. Wary, because even after all this time, he still doesn’t really understand why Q is doing this.
> 
> “They’re sending Moneypenny this time,” is all Q says. “Via Kosovo.”
> 
> “Eve.” He looks wistful when he says her name and Q can only wonder who she is to him, this time around. “Of course. She was always the best. Hated the double-oh program though, so she must really be getting a kick out of this.”
> 
> Further down the street, the 470 is starting to trundle noisily towards them, bright and empty. This will be the last time that Q will see him here, but somehow, farewells don’t seem apt. Instead:
> 
> “Remember to stay out of Turkey,” Q says in lieu of a goodbye as he rummages through his pockets for his Oyster. “They’ll be looking for you there. Bulgaria too, if it wasn’t obvious enough.”
> 
> “I do know how to take care of myself, ta,” comes the dry reply. “Not sure if I can say the same for you, though,” he adds and it’s just a play of light, but under the warm glow of the streetlamps, Q can pretend that he looks almost… fond.
> 
> It’s just Q at the bus stop by the time the 470 arrives, crunching gravel under its tires, and when he holds his Oyster up to the card-reader, his hands are just starting to tremble a little from the cold.

 

* * *

 

Prague is wet and miserable in early December, the Old Town shrouded in low-lying mist that makes the constant drizzle just all the more unpleasant than it already is. It’s not quite cold enough for snow to fall just yet, but the rain still freezes into slick, black patches of ice over the cobblestones, tourists slipping and sliding all over Charles Bridge until there’s been a veritable line of them clinging to the sides for support each day.

This early in the morning though, there’s no one else but Bond and a stray clutch of amateur photographers trying to catch a few shots before first light brings the rest of the tourists flocking back.

“ _Mluvíš anglicky?_ English?” One of the group has broken off to wander towards where Bond is loitering under the statue of St. Ludmila, trying to coax a flame towards his cigarette. “Thank god,” he breathes out when Bond nods and he puts his camera bag down, digging through it until he comes up with a pack of his own. “Here I was thinking I’d have to sprint back to the hotel to grab my lighter. Mind if I bum a light?”

Flop-haired and sleepy-eyed, he’s far younger than anyone that Bond had been expecting, so much so that Bond has to wonder if this is just some sort of terrible coincidence. Another minute or two and his actual contact will arrive, and when he does, Bond will hopefully be spared the task of having to eventually explain why he almost tried to pass off government secrets to an underage tourist.

“You people are starting young these days, aren’t you?” Bond says casually as he flips the lighter over. It’s caught with a flourish and a grin, young-and-flop-haired nodding his thanks before holding it up to the cigarette he has caught between his teeth.

“And you people just don’t know when to quit, don’t you?” comes the quick riposte. “Leiter sends his regards, by the way, and wants to tell you that he doesn’t regret not being here. Can’t really take the cold anymore, y’know. You won’t believe the sort of effort it takes to get him out _anywhere_ in the wintertime these days.”

Bond resists the urge to sigh as he watches the other man casually slip the lighter into his back pocket, talking a mile a minute as he does. Either the boys at Langley have taken to plucking them straight out of kindergarten these days or Bond really is getting old enough to see any agent under the age of thirty as nothing less than toddlers in suits.

“Anything else from Leiter?” he asks a little wearily once Max (“Oh, sorry, can’t believe I nearly forgot. Goddamn time-zones, I swear. The name’s Max. Well, actually Maxwell, but I’m still working on getting that bit redacted.”) seems to have come to the end of his one-man information dump.

“Apart from the fact that you apparently still owe him about twenty bucks from that time in Okinawa? Nope.” Max takes a cheerful pull on his smoke, only to immediately make a face. “Urgh. Don’t even know why I still try, honestly, it’s still as shit as the last time. But in any case, good chat, double-oh seven. I trust that I’ll be seeing you later?”

Bond just nods his assent, Max, in turn, giving him a brief, jaunty two-fingered salute on his way back to his group.

“Thanks for the light, man!” he calls over his shoulder and Bond does allow himself a sigh this time, letting the cold and the quiet wash over him again for a few moments before he leaves, tucking Max’s pack of Petra Extra Lights into the inside of his coat at he does.

 

* * *

 

For all his rambling and affinity for filling every spare second with small talk, Bond has to admit that Max does have his own uses, especially when Bond is the one that’s currently slumped against a living room wall and feeling the room start to spin.

“Listen,” Max is saying urgently from somewhere near the door. Lying between them, Benedikt’s body is still warm, blood seeping sluggishly into the carpet from where Bond had managed to put a bullet into the back of his head. “Listen to me, you absolutely _cannot_ go to sleep, okay? Do you hear me Bond? It’s going to be tempting, I know, but if you close your eyes before I get back, I can almost guarantee you that you’re not going to open them again.”

“Well isn’t that comforting.”

Turning Benedikt over, Max is currently rifling through the man’s pockets, quickly coming up with the wallet he had been looking for.

“Med evac–,” he grunts as he lets Benedikt’s body fall to the carpet again, “–is still at least half an hour away at this stage, but the good news is, there’s a pharmacy approximately five minutes from here at Palladium and I can probably cobble something together to tide you over in the meantime.”

In response to the doubtful look on Bond’s face, Max just makes a small scoffing sound and goes back to quickly counting the bills that Benedikt had left behind.

“Leiter didn’t tell you, did he?” He stuffs a wad of Euros into his coat, pocketing enough to probably buy out half the pharmacy if need be. “No of course not, because Leiter’s a secretive old bastard. Did four and half years at John Hopkins before recruitment, so if not for Langley’s very persuasive acquisition department, it would have been Dr. Max to you. Ergo–,” Max stands from where he had been kneeling by the body, face flushed from the adrenaline rush and still as impossibly young as ever, “–you can wipe that look off your face, old man, because you’re in pretty good hands. Now just stay still and don’t go to sleep. I’ll be back in ten.”

 

* * *

 

By the time Q picks up, Bond can feel his hands starting to shake, a chill working its way up his spine and into the bones of his fingers. Speakerphone it is, then.

“Hello, Q.”

“Bond?” The sound of Q’s surprise is coming in a bit staticky through the line, but it’s not like Bond really has a choice at this stage. “Is everything alright?”

“Right as rain, thanks for asking.”

“And the purpose of this call is…?”

Bond lifts his head from where he had been resting it against the wall, wincing as he accidentally jostles the stab in his side. “No real reason in particular,” he says as he shifts more carefully this time around. “Just had some time to kill, so I thought I’d call in.”

“A social call, then.” Q does _not_ sound amused. “Really.”

“Would you be more inclined to believe me if I told you it was important?”

“Not particularly, but you’re more than welcome to try.”

“Well, it is.” If Bond cranes his neck a little towards the left, he thinks he can just about see the Týn Church’s twin spires reaching skywards. Thin and sharp against the overcast sky, Bond has always thought they were the nicest feature in Prague’s minimalist skyline. “Have you figured out where you want to go for dinner yet? I was thinking Medlar, perhaps. Or Maroush? How do you feel about Lebanese food?””

“You called me just so we can discuss dinner reservations?”

“Do you not want to discuss dinner reservations?”

A small creak and the sound of wheels rolling briefly across concrete lets Bond know that Q has probably pushed away from his work table, leaning back in his desk chair after.

“I actually would,” he says at length. “But that said, aren’t you supposed to be doing something terribly important in Prague right now?”

Only three minutes have passed, which leaves an eternity before Max gets back.

“Bond? Are you there?”

Bond glances at the screen of his mobile and doesn’t find himself too surprised to see that it’s now three minutes, fifteen seconds. Honestly, he can’t account for where the last few seconds have went, but at this stage, it’s probably better that he doesn’t dwell on it.

“Did you know that Langley sent someone barely out of secondary school as their contact?” Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. As much as he wouldn’t like to admit it, Bond almost wishes he had Max’s gift of the continuous gab, if only to make sure that he’s not losing time between sentences. “I swear, he doesn’t look more than eighteen or twenty-five. Can’t really tell, these days.”

Another creak and a muffled clacking of keys this time, Q muttering something under his breath that’s too low for the phone to catch.

“Bond, why is Control indicating that we had a med-evac request put in for your location about four minutes ago?”

“Ah, about that.”

“ _Bond_.”

“It’s under control, Max should be back soon. He’s…” It’s a bit hard to remember where it is, exactly, that Max has disappeared to, but Bond is sure it’s important. “Somewhere around,” he finishes lamely. “Did you know he would have been a doctor if not for the CIA?” Bond has to laugh a little at this, only to regret it instantly when a sharp pain lances through his side and makes him inhale with a hiss. “He looks like he’s fifteen, Q.”

“He can be five for all I care, just as long as he’s on the way back.” On the line, Q’s voice is starting to sound tight, terse. In any other situation, Bond thinks he would have been flattered at the concern. “What’s the ETA he gave you, Bond?”

“Ten minutes? But that was…” He glances at his mobile again. “Five minutes ago. So just five minutes more. Hopefully.”

“Okay, that’s still faster than evac, they’re twenty minutes out.” A pause, before Q speaks again, voice wound tighter than a spring. “If you hang up on me now–,” he says sharply, “–I swear, double-oh seven, I might just fly over there and kill you myself. Do you understand?”

“Back to codenames now, are we? Things _must_ be serious.” Bond grins and hopes that Q can somehow hear it. “Then again, I use yours all the time. I wonder what that means.”

“It means that you’re still about five security clearance levels away from knowing my actual one, thank god.”

“Poor form, Q, that was your cue to say ‘oh James, it’s because everything you say about me is serious and important’. That or ‘If you survive this, James Bond, I’ll tell you my real name and anything else you want to to know.’ ”

It’s enough to shake a weak laugh out of Q, which in Bond’s books, is practically an achievement in itself.

“Statistically, you actually have quite a high chance of surviving this, so no, Bond, I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“Now you’re just being cruel to a dying man, what with the lying and withholding of crucial information.”

“Not a lie,” Q maintains, which Bond thinks is really quite admirable of him. Who knew the quartermaster could tell untruths just as smoothly as the rest of them? “But since we still have two minutes and seeing how we’re most likely going to have to call a rain check on dinner for the time being, you get one free pass to ask something.”

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine?”

“Within reason.”

“Always knew that you’d be one to drive a hard deal, Q.” A moment, as Bond considers all the possibilities. Family, perhaps? Q seemed like an only child, but it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for him to have a sibling. Or maybe how Six had found him, what he had been doing at that time.

“Well?” Q prompts. “Decided?”

“Cats,” comes the firm reply. “Your cats, tell me about them.”

The tone of Q’s voice isn’t quite aghast, but Bond has heard it enough to know that it’s close. “I give you one chance to ask me anything–,” he says, disbelieving, “–and you want to know about _cats_?”

“I don’t have any and never had any because I prefer dogs, but that said, cats are still lovely animals. That's my side of the story done, so now it's your turn to tell me yours.”

“...really?” Q sounds like he could be on the brink of laughter again, if not for the concern that gotten there first. “We’re really doing this?”

“Would you like prompts? We can start with their names if you’d like, work from there.”

It’s starting to drizzle again, light enough to be closer to mist than rain, but still heavy enough to be an annoyance to anyone caught outside. Nine minutes since Max left and Bond wonders what it says about his priorities if a large part of him is actually hoping that Max has underestimated how long he'd need.

“They’re street cats,” Q says haltingly, as if still not quite believing the words coming out of his mouth. "Pascal and Darcy, I took them in when they were kittens."

"Pascal and Darcy." Bond leans his head back against the wall and feels strangely satisfied. "Let me guess, Pascal for Pascal's law and Darcy for Pemberley’s favourite son?"

The scoff from Q is amused, Q obviously finding the notion of Jane Austen alongside principles of fluid dynamics ridiculous.

"Darcy for Darcy's law, more like. Rules that govern flow of fluids through porous mediums." Some of the earlier tension that Q had been carrying in his voice has started lessen, a gradual unraveling that Bond wants to continue picking at. Damn the exhaustion weighing down his bones. "It's funny, actually, how apt it's become," Q continues on. "He's a wriggly little bastard, always getting into places he shouldn't no matter how hard I try to keep him out."

It would be so easy to close his eyes for a moment, just a few seconds before Max gets back from wherever he's from.

"Bond?" Q's voice is sharp in his ear, startling. "I swear, if you don't stay awake–"

"The carrot and stick method doesn't work without a carrot, just so you know," says Bond drowsily. When did it get so hard to say simple words without slurring? "Can I meet your cats?"

"Stay awake until Max gets back and you can catsit them for all I care."

"Brilliant."

In the near distance, a door is slamming, footsteps and the sound of a familiar voice shouting his name.

"Bond?" Q sounds like he's hopelessly far away. "Bond, is that Max?"

A hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake ("Ah, Q is it? Calm down–" "Stop talking and just treat my agent, god fucking dammit.") the stinging prick of a needle on the inside of his arm, and then Bond is adrift, Max's voice a low murmur fading in the background.

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  **The fourth time** they meet, Q is not Q anymore. Not involved with Six in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not quartermaster, Q is just another cog in a corporate machine, another average Londoner with a mortgage to pay off on a comfortable flat in South Bank and two cats for company, a handful of work colleagues he actually enjoys spending time with.
> 
> “You keen on joining us for drinks at Primo?” Tara is peering curiously into Q’s office, his wide-open door at the end of the workday a clear invitation for anyone to pop their heads in for a chat.
> 
> “The one at Park Plaza, you mean?”
> 
> “That’s the one, yep. Suraj and the rest have gotten it into their heads that they deserve some music after today’s clusterfuck of a merger, so they’re thinking of splitting an Uber to get there in a bit. So, keen?”
> 
> “Maybe. Yes, if you’re offering to drive.”
> 
> “Smart lad. I’m already taking Jules as it is, so you’re going to have to fight her for the back seat, since the passenger one might or might not have digestive crumbs all over it.”
> 
> “Phil again?”
> 
> Sighing, Tara just leans against the door-jamb and rolls her eyes. “I’m just glad it isn’t chocolate like last week. I mean, I like Cadbury Cremes as much as the next person, but smeared all over my dashboard?” She pulls a face and Q has to laugh at the very thought. “Spare me, god. It’s enough to swear me off spawning again for another lifetime, at least.”
> 
> “Well I can't promise I'll be a better passenger than Phil is, but I can at least assure you I don't have any chocolates on my person.”
> 
> “Excellent. I’ll go round to collect Jules and we’ll meet you downstairs at six?”
> 
> Turning back to the screen of his desktop, Q thinks, not for the first time, that this is a life he might be able to get used to. Quiet and unobtrusive. Normal beyond belief, where he has colleagues who can go home to steady, growing families and not sleepless nights spent trying to convince themselves it’s not their fault, that yet another operative bled out in the field.
> 
> Later in the car, Jules calls shotgun so Q gets relegated to the backseat, day-dreaming out of the window as Tara takes them over Vauxhall Bridge and down towards Albert Embankment.
> 
> “It’s a bit melancholic, isn’t it?” Jules says from the front seat as the SIS building start to comes up on their left. It’s a ruin these days, abandoned after last year’s attacks and just waiting for demolition. Q had heard about it on the news and gone about his day with a lump in his throat after that, spent his night worming into Six’s records to search for anything on that one name. “Grand old thing like that, about to be pulled down.”
> 
> “It only came up in ‘94, so it’s not like we’re losing a major landmark.”
> 
> “True that. Thoughts from the back?”
> 
> Q stirs. Has to wonder for a brief, slightly mad moment what they would do if Q told them he knows the building like the back of his hand, has walked its corridors and slept, fitfully, in its rec room on the fifth floor after long shifts.
> 
> “I always thought it was ugly as sin,” he says truthfully. “Also, it’s not very secret is it, for something that houses the secret service?”
> 
> Later, stumbling out of Primo as a ragtag bunch splitting up towards their respective Tube stations and cars and bus stops, Q trails after Jules who needs to get on the 148 to Shepherd’s Bush, the two of them heading towards Westminster Bridge where the stop is.
> 
> “You’re lucky you can practically just crawl home from here,” she’s saying as they walk. “What’s it to yours, hey? Fifteen minutes by foot?”
> 
> “I can stretch it to half an hour if I go by along the river, but yea, about there.”
> 
> “Urgh, my kingdom and then some for a place in the city tonight.”
> 
> They’re close enough to feel the explosion when it happens, the ground shaking underneath their feet when the last of Six crashes to the ground in the distance, a cloud of dust already starting to billow across the Thames by the time the shock lets go.
> 
> “Good god,” Q can hear someone say somewhere behind him. “D’you reckon that was a demolition? Or…”
> 
> The rest of it is lost under the scattered shouts and screams that lift from those on the bridge, Q feeling a sense of detached surreality blanket him as he tracks the helicopter veering towards them, burning at its tail.
> 
> “Jules–”
> 
> A loud crash, Q pulling Jules behind him as the copter slams into the bridge, skidding across the asphalt with a screech of metal. In the distance, police sirens are already wailing towards them.
> 
> “Fuck,” Jules breathes. “Is this even real?”
> 
> It is. Q has seen things like this a dozen times before and orchestrated them at least a dozen times more, but watching it happen here and now, in this life, all it does is churn his stomach.
> 
> “Come on, we should clear the area.”
> 
> The sound of burning metal strains in the air and underneath it, the slick, nauseating smell of kerosene is starting to float downwind from the crash, Q hurriedly pushing Jules ahead of him even as he looks back over his shoulder.
> 
> It’s almost like one of those scenes that happens in slow motion, when Q sees him. With Mallory and Tanner coming up just a few paces behind him, he’s walking from the other side of the bridge, gun in hand and closing in on the man who’s trying to drag himself out of the burning wreckage.
> 
> “Oh my god,” Jules is saying. Her grip is tight on Q’s arm. “What–”
> 
> Of course.
> 
> Of course Six would be behind something like this. Of course he would be at the forefront of all this madness, blood-smeared and steel-eyed and still the most beautiful creature that Q thinks he’ll ever know.
> 
> The man from the copter has curled in on himself, his front to Q.
> 
> “We need to leave.” Jules, urgent and afraid, tugging on Q’s hand because Q is suddenly rooted to the spot “Quick, come on. It’s not safe.”
> 
> And when is it ever, with this lot?
> 
> The gun that the man has clutched close to his stomach is a Springfield 1911 TRP .45 automatic colt, G10 grip and a clean 4.5lb pull. A lifetime or two ago, Q might have even been persuaded to outfit agents with the same, though he still prefers the simple functionality of the Walther PPK/S.
> 
> “What are you–”
> 
> Time has slowed to a stop, and as the split second decision presents itself, Q has barely enough time to feel a pang of regret before the name is out of his mouth, a loud, desperate _get down_ that has every trained agent on the bridge hitting the ground under the sudden staccato of gunfire.
> 
> He lives that night, on the bridge. Q will have to lose Jules in the crowd and never come back, never having anything like this life again, but oh, he lives.

 

* * *

 

Even though it takes only a handful of days for Bond to feel well enough to drag himself out of bed and back into the land of the living, it’s a full week before Control decides to reinstate his access privileges to Six, Medical vehemently siding with Control and Q branch, in turn, remaining quite deaf to Bond’s repeated requests for a spare key card to be made.

“Stay home,” Q tells him firmly each time, always more exasperated than the last. “You nearly _died_ , Bond, what on earth is even wrong with you?”

Bond would argue that _almost_ is the operative word in that sentence, but Q always hangs up before Bond can state his point, leaving Bond to rattle discontentedly around his empty excuse of a flat for a few hours before calling Q again.

It’s on the morning of the sixth day, though, that the pattern breaks:

“You do know, right, that no matter how many times you call, the answer is still going to be a no?” Q’s voice is coming from further away than usual, probably having put Bond on speakerphone so he can work as he speaks. “Give up, Bond. Just enjoy your last day of downtime like any normal person would.”

“But how can I, when each time you pick up, it just gives me hope?”

There's the distinct sound of typing, followed by a series of muted thuds and pages being flipped. Textbooks, perhaps? Pacing around the living room of his flat, Bond thinks he can remember them from what feels practically like a lifetime ago, volumes on thermodynamics and the like crowding the middle of Q’s desk to prop his tablet up.

“Better a minute or two of pandering to your needs, rather than risk something like Prague again.” Q sighs then, a long, tired exhale. “Or at least that's what I used to tell myself. Now, I'm wondering if it isn't better to block your number and just let fate decide.”

“Does your kind even believe in fate?”

“My kind?” Strange, that the tone of Q’s voice suddenly sounds almost as if he’s wary, Bond having to wonder for a moment if he’d accidentally misspoken. Either that, or Q was part of the curious subset of engineers that didn’t like to be reminded of their jobs. Either way:

“Engineers and those of similar inclinations,” Bond clarifies. “Your kind.”

Walking past the fireplace with its ornamental mirror above it and arriving back at his sofa for what feels like the nth time that afternoon, Bond finally gives in, sinking into it with his feet propped onto his coffee table.

“Call it morbid–,” he continues as he narrowly avoids sending a number of unread books crashing to the floor, “–but I half expected you to have some sort of equation on hand, something to calculate the probability of me being in a near-death situation whenever I call you.”

“Maybe I do, and the odds aren’t in your favour.”

“Or maybe you just like taking my calls.”

A scoff from Q’s end, Q shutting one textbook with a solid _whump_. “Whatever makes you sleep better at night, Bond. Also, just so we’re clear on this, if you call me again, please bear in mind that the answer is still no, and you’re better off finding something to do until Control lets you back in themselves because I certainly won’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, some of us actually have work to do, so–”

“Wait,” Bond says urgently before Q can hang up as usual. “Wait, before you go, there's one more thing.”

It's a testament to Q’s levels of tolerance, really, that he doesn't hang up there and then.

“Don’t tell me,” comes the dry reply instead. “It’s important?”

“Of course it is.” A beat, as Bond weighs his options and pushes on, regardless. “Would you happen to be free for dinner tonight?”

 

* * *

 

When presented with the absolutely unchangeable options of Bond waiting outside of Q’s flat or picking him up from Q branch after hours, it comes as little surprise that Q eventually caves and lets Bond back into the system fifteen hours before he’s supposed to be back, Bond in turn promising to keep his side of the deal by only coming in at 6:30pm.

“You can technically call it a week at that point,” he tries to rationalise when Q mutters something about both Control and Medical having his head for this. “Anything after 5pm would be, if we’re going by regular office hours.”

“If anyone asks, let the record show that I was coerced into this. Blackmailed, even.” Q sighs, though Bond can tell his heart isn’t really in it. “I think I’m starting to notice a theme here.”

“At least I asked about dinner first this time, didn’t I?”

“Gold star for effort, Bond, well done.”

“I do try.”

Which sees Bond standing on the threshold to Q’s office at approximately 6:27pm, acutely aware of two things:

One, that Q is absolutely nowhere to be seen, and two, that there is a cinnamon coloured tabby sitting on Q’s desk, nonchalantly licking one paw as it pays Bond no attention at all.

In Q’s defence, he _had_ thought to warn ahead about the latter, something or other about construction next door prompting a temporary relocation lest he come home to a flat shredded apart by two incredibly stressed cats, but… still. It gives Bond pause to see the tabby with its tail curled around itself, sitting where Q usually has at least two different dismantled firearms lying about.

“Q?”

A muffled sound – most likely cursing, from the vehemence of it – echoes from behind the filing cabinets that line the eastern wall of Q’s workspace, Bond noting with amusement how those old, rusted wartime relics have been unceremoniously shoved aside to make a space that’s barely big enough to squeeze behind.

Smart money would place the quartermaster behind them, though Bond really has to wonder at the exact chain of events that led him there.

“Let me guess,” Bond calls out cheerfully as he walks up to take a closer look. “Darcy?”

A pointed _urgh_ confirms this, along with the sight of Q crouched behind the cabinets as he tries to persuade a yowling, obviously protesting tuxedo cat out from an unreachable corner.

“It’s the third bloody time today,” he mutters as he makes another vain attempt to get at Darcy, who just narrows amber eyes at Q. “Third. I can’t even comprehend anymore, why he insists on going in there when he knows he’s going to need help getting out.”

If Bond had to look at this interaction in retrospect, he supposes it could have been one of those strange, spur of the moment reactions, the kind of white lie response that triggers and makes people say things without really thinking them through. Like “I’m fine, I can handle it on my own,” for example, or “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

“Let me try to get the cat,” Bond says, and it’s only as he’s inching into the space Q has made that Bond belatedly remembers he’s never held a cat in his entire life, let alone tried to retrieve a disgruntled one.

“I don’t suppose you have some sort of–” he’s just starting to backtrack when Bond finds himself being met with a sudden, furry presence trying to crawl into his lap, Darcy announcing his intentions with a throaty _mwowr?_ until Bond consents to pick him up, Q watching incredulously the entire time.

“Of course he would,” he mutters to himself as Bond shimmies and wriggles his way out from behind the cabinets with a strangely content cat dangling from his grasp. “Bloody cat.”

“Are you going to take your cat?” Bond pointedly holds Darcy up. “Or…”

“Or you can hold on to him for the next few minutes, seeing how I think he actually likes you and I need to make sure he doesn’t get back behind there.”

Without waiting for Bond’s reply, Q has already turned to start dragging the cabinets back into place, leaving Bond to awkwardly try and cathandle Darcy into a more sustainable hold.

“You’re a bit of a nuisance, aren’t you?” he tells the cat now cradled in his arms. Darcy, in turn, just closes his eyes and lets out a contented purr, Bond resigning himself to commandeering Q’s desk chair when he nearly trips over Pascal doing curious figure eights around his ankles.

In all, it takes a good five minutes for Q to drag an assortment of spare parts and boxes across his underground office, effectively blocking off every conceivable place a cat could try and squeeze into.

“If not for the time–,” he says a little defensively when he catches Bond watching him work with a wide grin and a sleepy cat in his lap, “–I’d come up with something a bit more elegant, trust me.”

“Well we still have a bit of time until dinner, so if you want to try, I daresay you still have a fair bit of time.”

Across the room, Q is hoisting another boxful of old files into place. “Not that,” he manages with a short huff as he lets go of the files. “I meant the time that my demon cats will be spending here. Last I heard, construction should be done before the weekend, so they only really have another day or two here before I can take them home.”

“Was it the noise that they can’t take?”

“Noise and the dust, actually, but admittedly, the latter is just me being a bit overcautious for Pascal.” Who, after remaining unsuccessful in getting Bond to pick him up, has now retreated to his earlier post on the worktable, fixing Bond with a slightly accusing state that sometimes gets appeased with a hesitant scratch behind one ear. Q gently shoos him off the table when he comes back from cat-proofing. “Took him ages to shake off a respiratory infection the last time, so I’d rather not risk that again.”

“And Darcy?”

At the sound of his name, Darcy arches upwards under Bond’s palm, demanding and receiving a long stroke along the length of his back, white-tipped tail lashing in approval.

“Isn't bothered by much,” Q completes. “But it didn't seem quite fair to leave one and take the other, so here we are. Also, you can let him down now, if you’d like.”

“I would, except…” Except Darcy seems to be vocally protesting the idea, coming back and incessantly pawing at Bond’s trouser leg even after Q has helped pluck Darcy off Bond’s lap to set on the ground. “Does he do this to everyone?”

“Hmm?” Barely looking up from where he’s packing his laptop into his messenger bag, Q lifts his head when Darcy lets out a particularly insistent _mwowr_ at Bond. The look on his face is contemplative, as he studies both cat and man. “No, he doesn’t, actually. I wasn’t kidding when I called them demon cats; the excitement of having them down here actually wore off very quickly for the rest of the branch.”

It’s hard to associate the cats sitting plaintively at Bond’s feet with what Q is saying, but given how they _do_ belong to Q, Bond supposes there could be some measure of truth to it. Bond wouldn’t stoop so low as to call Q fickle with his emotions, but…

Pascal uses his head to butt at Bond’s leg, Bond eventually consenting to picking him up lest he has to walk into Kurobuta later with cat hair all over his trouser legs.

“They just like me better than the rest, that’s all,” Bond says as – much to Q’s chagrin – he sets Pascal back on the table. “Something to do with mimicking the inclinations of their owner, perhaps?”

“I’ll have you know that I like my branch staff just fine.”

But Q is smiling just a little as he turns back to packing his bag, and Bond is content to take the silence after that as an answer in itself.

 

* * *

 

It might be because it’s late in the day and sharing plates are better conversation starters than any bowl of salad can ever hope to be, but Bond finds that it takes only a serving of flamed edamame – lashed with sake and salt and an inexplicably buttery twist of citrus – before Q relaxes enough to laugh, the sound of it low and genuine under the restaurant’s warm lights.

“No wonder Japan has all but disappeared from your dossiers,” he says as he carefully maneuvers a plump slice of sashimi onto his plate. Yellowtail, garnished with freshly chopped wasabi and resting in yuzu-infused soy. “I’d be surprised if Control ever lets you back near the country.”

“Why do you think I come here so often?”

This is only a half lie, seeing how Bond lives just around the corner and honestly cannot be arsed to go anywhere else, Kurobuta’s astronomical prices be damned. It’s not like he’s using his paychecks from Six for anything better anyways.

There’s a tender, tea-smoked lamb that follows after the yellowtail, and as ridiculously addictive as the meat is, Bond thinks it can’t really hold a candle to the way that it comes with a side of Q actually answering his probing questions, albeit a little haltingly at first, and with obvious redactions.

A sister, nameless and not seen in years, though they parted on good terms.

Degrees in physics and applied engineering, from places that Bond can only guess at.

“Cambridge?” Bond tries when a plate of baby shrimp arrives, coated in a tempura batter that’s as almost as light as air itself. “Bristol? Imperial?”

Dipping a shrimp in the warm ponzu sauce that the dish had come with, Q merely shrugs. “Maybe it wasn’t even a university in the UK,” he says, teasingly ambiguous. “It could be Geneva for all you know. How _was_ Geneva, anyways? I can’t imagine how lectures entirely in French must have been like.”

“You know about that?”

Q shoots Bond a look that seems to succinctly encompass the base sentiments of _Who do you think I am?_ and _I’d be stupid not to_.

“ _Il était foutrement horrible._ ” Bond finally says. This, at least, draws out a smile for all his efforts. “I still get flashbacks whenever I need to speak in the bloody language.”

“Well at least that explains why you always make such a fuss whenever we have to liaison with the DGSE.”

“That and the fact that Hugo is a pain to work with.” The look on Q’s face makes it obvious that Bond’s sentiments are shared, if not exactly vocalised. “It’s like having two migraines at once.”

“Still can’t be as bad as ASIS though.”

“Three migraines for that lot, no one should have any business being in a time zone like that.”

Sharing food, conversation, and the occasional complaint like this, falling into a rhythm that’s near natural in its ebb and flow, Bond can more or less pretend that they’ve done this a thousand times before, Q taking small sips of sake across him and their feet always just shy of touching under the table. In another life, perhaps, or some other world. Not that Bond would give up this one for anything else at the moment, but… still.

Sometimes Q speaks to him as if he knows Bond better than he lets up on, and others, it’s as if he’s checking himself mid-thought, self-censoring when he seems to remember that he doesn’t.

A plate of grilled aubergine, sesame-crusted and sticky-sweet with miso, arrives at the table, Q delicately picking the candied walnuts off his piece to try on their own.

“Sweet tooth,” he admits sheepishly when he catches Bond watching. “Not that you didn’t already know that.”

“Remember me in your benevolent, pastry-based dictatorship, that’s all I’m asking,” Bond says with mock seriousness in return, wondering if Q even remembers what he’s referring to. Judging from the way that it takes Q legitimate effort to swallow before letting out a surprised laugh though, it’s evident that he does, Q actually having to look away for a moment.

“Just as long as there are macarons, Bond.”

And in that moment, Bond decides that he doesn’t want to give Q any cause to ever remember that he doesn’t quite know Bond, no reason at all for Q to pause and amend something he wants to say just because Bond is still a stranger he’s yet to know.

 

* * *

 

Should anyone ask Bond later how they manage to go from restaurant to street to stairs to the front door of Bond’s apartment, solid wood pressed up against Q’s back and Bond’s lips tracing the sharp, slanting angle of Q’s jaw, Bond is most likely to hazard a guess that the sake had something to do with it, those small, warm cups of _junmai-shu_ sipped throughout the meal far stronger than either of them had thought.

The lens of Q’s glasses may be smudged, but when Bond chances a glance, Q is still as clear-eyed as ever when he tilts his head up, an intense clarity to his gaze that makes Bond want to nip at the pale skin of Q’s throat.

He does then, gently, because in a time like this, instincts are for acting on, and with Q’s back arching off the wood, there’s just enough space for Bond to slip a hand behind Q, his palm pressed against the small of Q’s back to bring him in closer.

“Is this okay?” he murmurs. “I won’t, if not.”

It’s not as if Six would care much, Bond more than sure that there are greater sins one could commit before anyone so much as batted an eyelid, let alone haul them both up for questioning. He has to make sure though, not only because there’s the bittersweet tang of sake on Q’s tongue, but because this is Q. This is the voice in his ear and the gun in his hand, a living, breathing body that’s suddenly still.

There’s a strange sort of distance in Q’s eyes when Bond pulls away a fraction to look at him.

“Q?”

Soft, prompting. Enough to make Q’s gaze flit back towards Bond, dragged away from where he had been looking beyond Bond’s shoulder.

“We could,” Q says after a beat and it’s almost sad, the way he says it. “But I vaguely remember someone once telling me that could and should are vastly different things.”

“Semantics,” sighs Bond. He can feel the slight pressure of Q’s hands curled around his hips and it’s a small comfort, that Q still hasn’t let go yet. “Always knew that would come and bite me back in the arse one day.”

“Could have, should have, would have?”

In response, Bond just kisses the side of Q’s mouth, Q turning his head that small amount so that Bond can catch his lips instead. It’s a chaste apology and one that Bond knows he doesn’t need.

“It’s okay,” he says, meaning it, and Q’s fingers linger for a moment, regretful against Bond’s side before they fall away in quiet acceptance.

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  **The fifth time** they meet, she has eyes bluer than anything Q can ever remember seeing on a man, the set of her mouth amused and the sound of her voice all too familiar when Q stammers his way through their introductions.
> 
> “You’re adorable,” she decides by the end of it. “I think we’re going to work well together.”
> 
> What is surprising is that they do, or at least they do once Q gradually gets over the fact that he is actually a she this time around. They are friends, here. Good friends, even, and with her spitfire humour and ready smiles for him, she is nearly everything Q imagines he would have been like in a perfect world. The knot in Q’s chest may never really go away, but living like this, having her saunter into his branch unannounced and always welcome, the weight of it lessens with time, a slow undoing that comes with the wistful comfort of knowing that Q can never want her this way, not really.
> 
> “It’s a crying shame,” she bemoans each time Q has to reject her numerous, unceasing advances. “I’m lucky enough to have one reliable man in my life and yet, I can’t even get him to love me. Tell me, Q, what is it exactly that I’m doing wrong here?”
> 
> They’re sprawled on Q’s sofa this time, Darcy purring contentedly in her lap and Pascal taking charge of the coffee table, occasionally batting at her bare feet. Time and again Q has tried to get her to break the habit but here they are, still, her feet on his table and his damn cat doing nothing to help.
> 
> “Besides being the completely wrong gender?” Q can feel her weight against him, her short-cropped hair soft against his shoulder when she leans into it. It says a lot these days, that the warmth is a comfort. “I’d say it’s a toss up between your enormous ego and the fact that you never listen to a thing I say.”
> 
> “I listen to the important things, at least. Also, it’s not an ego when it’s just stating the facts.”
> 
> “Case in point.”
> 
> She treats this flat like it’s her own, sometimes, and given how much time she actually spends here as opposed to her own place in Chelsea, Q can’t really blame her. It’s the feel of the place, she says. The cats too, and the way that they adore her even more than the person who actually feeds them.
> 
> To be frank, Q secretly thinks that she just likes not having to buy her own groceries, but whatever it may be, it’s not an arrangement that he minds. For every day she spends here, it’s another day with the sound of her voice echoing off these walls, Q living a little longer, getting a little more acquainted with the idea of not being alone.
> 
> And yet, she knows that he’s lonely. Can tell from way he never brings anyone home (“That you know of!” “I know, Q, I just do.”) and how Q avoids the issue with the ease of someone who’s been lying for a long time.
> 
> “This is going to be first time in my life that I’m saying this out loud, but sometimes I really wish I had been born a man instead. Jamie, perhaps. Or James. James Bond. Bit of a ring to that.”
> 
> “Eh?” The name gives him pause, but with his back turned to her, at least she can’t see how he almost sliced through his own finger at the sound of it. “What’s this about?”
> 
> Another weekend, another day spent avoiding the dust that must be building up at her own flat. She’s perched on the edge of Q’s kitchen table to watch him throw something that might, with lowered standards, resemble something akin to lunch.
> 
> “I’m just saying. The fiddly bits and the urge to be completely unreasonable at times would be a pain, but…” A pause as she tries to find the right words. “Look at us,” she eventually settles on, concise. “Don’t you sometimes think about how in some parallel universe, there’s a version of this that will end up with us in bed?”
> 
> “You already try to sleep in my bed sometimes as it is,” Q points out. “The last time, when I was still in it, if you recall.”
> 
> “Good times, that. But you know what I mean.” Pushing off from the table, she goes to join Q at the counter, knowing that he will tolerate her chin on his shoulder as she watches him cook. “Just think about it. How convenient it’d be, to be in love with the right person.”
> 
> “You’re not in love with me. Not in that way, in any case.”
> 
> “I could be, in this other place. Stop detracting from the point I’m trying to make here, Q.”
> 
> “I’m sorry, there was a point?”
> 
> She pokes him in the side, hard.
> 
> “Here I am trying to present an interesting scenario and–”
> 
> “And I’m trying to cook lunch, thank you.” Q knows a lost cause when he sees one though, which means he ends up throwing the last of the carrots into the pot and setting it to simmer before turning round to face her. “But for the sake of discussion–,” he sighs as he herds her back to the table, “–I would argue that it’d only be convenient if the right person loved you back too.”
> 
> “There’s always something missing, isn’t it? We came closer than a lot of people often do but it’s still a shame, to think that we could have had it.”
> 
> Sitting with her like this in the early afternoon sun, it’s almost like pressing on an old bruise, the instantly recognisable ache of it filling him again. She’s right, that they’ve come closer than Q has ever before, but even then, it doesn’t feel like enough. At this rate, he has to wonder if it ever will be, or if it’s even meant to.
> 
> Statistically, though, out of all the infinite number of worlds and realities, of all the endless possibilities, shouldn’t there be a place and time where they do get it right? Someplace somewhere, that they’re finally thrown together in the right way and time.
> 
> “Q?”
> 
> He could be happy here. He should be. Hell, he is, most of the time, and in ways that he never thought possible before, but here is the thought that has pursued him through every life, followed him into every version of events:
> 
> What if there is a place where he’s happier still?
> 
> “Bond,” he says haltingly. “This is going to sound insane, but I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else.

 

* * *

 

Since Bond and Q are fully grown adults, they handle it the way that actual adults do: by throwing themselves into their work and pretending that everything is alright.

Bond tells himself that it is, really, but sometimes, he finds himself standing in the midst of his empty flat just wondering where it is that they had gone wrong. Looking up at the space above his fireplace only to see the reflection of a man who refuses to admit that for the first time in a long while, he just might be disappointed and more than a little lonely

Q seems to be coping slightly better, at least. He still smiles when Bond needlessly wanders down into his branch, still offers the occasional barbed comment when provoked though this time around, it’s with considerably less ease than before.

It’s like they’ve regressed to the great before, and everything that came after some subtle point in time – Bond secretly thinks that him almost dying has something to do with it – has been erased. Year zero again and back to the start, Q hiding behind the reliable, clinical safety of conversations made entirely witty ripostes. Bond thinks he wouldn’t mind if he didn’t know how Q looks when he laughs, or when Q is listening, _really_ listening, the weight of his attention just about enough to feel like a physical thing, but…

Here’s the thing.

He knows.

Knows, intimately, how Q tastes like as well, against his mouth, and how Q’s hands had felt against him, fingers pressed into his skin.

Bond knows, remembers every single moment even, and oh, god, he misses it more than he can say.

 

* * *

 

 

> _...In more recent news, however, they’ve finally let me have your flat. It must look odd to most, I think, but I daresay I play the part of a grieving agent/friend/widow particularly well, so no one wants to question the decision just yet. If and when they do (you used to supervise a particularly nosy bunch, didn’t you?) I think I might just tell them the truth – that your flat was always the nicer one anyways, and Chelsea is far too posh by half for my liking._
> 
> _Also, let it be known that I make no apologies for sending only Pascal back this time. It goes without saying that Darcy is by far the more tolerant of the two when it comes to this antiquated carrier-pigeon-esque set up that we have, but that said, he’s also obviously the one that loves me the most out of you three. Have either you or Pascal ever willingly jumped into my lap and stayed there for as long as it took to fill in the paperwork for Accounts? No, the both of you have not. As such, I am keeping him for as long as he’ll have me._
> 
> _You really do have some nerve, leaving like this and making me miss you. I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before and almost a million times at this point, but it still bears repeating because it’s true._
> 
> _Much love,  
>  Jane (and Darcy)_

 

* * *

 

The day that things go to absolute shit at Six, Bond is blessedly uninvolved, his area of expertise all but irrelevant in the face of the hack that’s threatening to drag every last scrap of information that they have on anything and anyone out into the light.

Q, on the other hand, runs himself ragged.

Bond knows it’s serious the moment he sees Q actually making a rare appearance at base, expression tight and limbs stiff as he delegates and repurposes, the floor their internal servers are on all but swarming with equally stressed teams trying to contain the leak the best they can.

There will be something for him to do later, probably, when someone figures out who it is that keeps trying to dump strictly confidential information online, but for now, all Bond can do is keep mostly out of the way, circling round every so often only to surreptitiously check in on Q.

Four hours turns to eight turns to twelve turns to what Bond thinks should be unacceptable, especially when a bleary-eyed programmer that he manages to corner in the corridor blurts out that they contained the threat at least three hours ago.

“He’s running a full systems check, sir,” he says in the face of Bond’s accusing stare. “It usually takes a while, but at this rate, he’s probably doing it a few times just to be sure.”

“And is the quartermaster the only person with the clearance to do that?”

The techie blinks. “Of course not. That would just be stupid, not to mention completely irresponsible.”

Which is more than enough for Bond to go on when he stalks up to Q sitting on the floor of the server room, cardigan wrapped tight around him and laptop humming on his lap.

“If you’re here to try and get me to leave–,” Q says wearily as Bond approaches, “–I’ll have you know that at least two others have tried and failed before you.”

“Because they’re idiots, that’s why.”

“So, one of my assistants and the chief of staff? Tanner won’t appreciate that, I think.”

“Tanner signed off on this, actually. He’s outside right now, slightly irritated that he can’t threaten you into leaving.”

“And you can?” Q taps at his keyboard, eyes tracking the screen as he does. “In all seriousness, Bond, please. Just let me do my job so I can go home that much quicker.”

 

“As opposed to leaving right now?” The urge to just shut Q’s laptop for him and drag him out of the room is a strong one, but Bond will do this right or not at all. “I have at least three different people outside with Tanner right now who can do this particular job for you, so in all seriousness as well, Q, please let them.”

Because Q is as stubborn as Bond can be sometimes, all Bond gets in reply is silence, Q pointedly not looking at Bond even when Bond gets down onto the floor next to him.

“Q,” he says carefully. “Listen, I know that in your version of events, you see this as a necessary thing. I’m not going to contest that because it’ll only be my brand of logic up against yours, and we’re just going to sit here all day if that happens. What I will do, though, is appeal to something else entirely.”

“Oh?” Q’s fingers have paused over the keys. “And what is that?”

“The fact that your cats are probably starving and wondering whether you’re ever coming home.”

For a moment, Bond has to wonder if it even worked, the complete lack of any noticeable reaction from Q as frustrating as it is slightly worrying, but then Q is setting his laptop aside and struggling to his feet, going as far as to let Bond help pull him up.

“ _ Fils de pute, qui était injuste et inutile, _” he sighs, but all it does is bring a grin to Bond’s face. “ _ Putain, je suis crevé. _”

 

* * *

 

 

> _...You will be (dis)pleased to hear that Six continues to run perfectly fine without you, even if M sometimes mutters under her breath about the competencies of your successor. No one has the heart to tell him that we don’t really go for the exploding pens these days so here we are, toting explosives in our front pockets and bags._
> 
> _Poor Boothroyd, I know that he tries hard, but beyond that impressive track record of yours, you did leave a rather good impression on M, and god knows that alone is a hard standard to live up to._
> 
> _Also, I did tell you I would make an excellent man! Bit of a pity with the hair, though. Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done about it?_
> 
> _Much love,  
>  J._

 

* * *

 

Removed from the source of his adrenaline, all the fight has seeped out from Q, and from there it takes little to no effort for Bond to persuade Q to get into his car. To give Q some credit, he does at least attempt the expected “I can get a cab” excuse before Bond shoots it down without even trying.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bond scoffs and Q must truly be exhausted indeed, to not offer an immediate counter-argument. Instead, all Q does is let Bond herd him into the passenger seat, only coming alive at intermittent points to direct Bond down a street or past a certain set of traffic lights.

By the time Bond pulls into a quiet road in Colliers Wood, there’s no question of following up after Q just to make sure he doesn’t fall down the stairs or collapse on the landing, Q offering no objection when Bond walks through the door with him.

“Go to bed,” Bond says when Q just stands for a second or two at the threshold to his kitchen, trying to remember what it is that he’s supposed to do. “Tell me where the food is and I’ll feed them, wherever they are.”

“Sulking, probably.”

“Bowls in the kitchen?”

“Floor, next to the table. Food’s under the sink, one cup each.” Close to wilting where he stands, Q honest to god stumbles more than walks away from the kitchen, pausing only to press his lips very, very briefly against Bond’s cheek. “Thank you,” he says, quiet, before shuffling off towards his bedroom.

It’s the very opposite of an apology this time around and perhaps Q’s exhaustion-induced lack of inhibitions is catching, because Bond doesn’t immediately suppress the warm flare of optimism that he suddenly finds lodged in his chest.

 

* * *

 

 

> _I want to say that I understand your logic, but honestly Q, I don’t. Is there something that you’re afraid of? Some sort of strange flight-only instinct that you’ve picked up during all your wanderings?_
> 
> _I want to wring your neck, I really do. Just count yourself lucky that I can’t reach you from here._
> 
> _J._

 

* * *

 

The thing about feeding cats, Bond finds, is that the process generally involves actually having cats to feed. Opening and shutting the cabinet door had been enough to coax Pascal out from where he’d been hiding near the fridge, but try as Bond might, Darcy is still nowhere to be found, Pascal completely unhelpful in the way he’s only interested in eating and getting Bond to pet him.

“I don’t suppose you’d know where he is?”

Done with his food, Pascal just lets out a contented purr, rubbing himself against Bond’s in an attempt to get Bond to pick him up.

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

Cat trailing after him, Bond relocates to the living room again. He hadn’t expected Q’s flat to be as spartan as his, but surveying the mostly empty bookcase and half filled boxes, their contents scattered in small, controlled piles, it’s like having walked into the life of someone who’s perpetually uncommitted to the idea of fully moving in.

There’s a sofa, at least, though no coffee table. A stack of books bearing a striking resemblance to Bond’s own – though Bond certainly wouldn’t read something called _Applied Engineering Failure Analysis_ – is currently as an impromptu replacement, though, complete with a forgotten mug of tea left to cool on top of it. Low shelves line one wall while against another, what Bond assumes is a decorative mirror lies propped and covered with a dust sheet, underneath which–

“Fucking hell,” Bond swears under his breath as he goes to get Darcy. “Where on earth were you hiding?”

The meow he gets is a high one, Bond lifting the sheet to have what he’s sure is definitely not Darcy immediately make a beeline for his ankles. If Darcy had been a fully grown tuxedo, the cat currently winding around his feet can’t be anything more than a few months old, considerably shorter in length and yet somehow still as familiar.

Also, there’s also the issue of the ribbon around its neck, but Bond isn’t too concerned about the details at the moment.

“It can’t possibly be,” he mutters, picking the cat up for a better look.

Except it inexplicably is, from the amber eyes to the white-tipped tail, Darcy just as pliant and affectionate in Bond’s arms as the first time they met. This much closer, Bond spots the rolled up piece of paper too, tied into the knot of the ribbon around Darcy’s neck.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Did the etiquette that made it rude to open someone else’s letters apply to messages tied around feline necks? Or would Bond be better off just writing this off as a very strange hallucination, obviously some unexpected byproduct of secondhand stress.

Still holding Darcy, Bond sits himself down onto Q’s sofa, Darcy taking it as an obvious indication that he should go to sleep right there and then on Bond’s lap. The weight is real enough, at least, and so is the warm fur under Bond’s hand.

“You _are_ Darcy, aren’t you?”

In response, Darcy just arches up into Bond’s touch, a demanding, yet impossible mirror of that last evening.

Bond undoes the ribbon with steady hands and his heart in his throat.

 

* * *

 

 

> _Why is it so hard to accept the fact that out of all the infinite number of worlds, that there is one where I really am in love with you?_
> 
> _You’re an idiot. Please, stop being one._
> 
> _J._

 

* * *

 

Darcy yowls unappreciatively when Bond sets him aside, Pascal merely watching in polite disinterest as Bond desperately hunts for a pen, a paper, anything at all to make sure he’s not on the brink of completely losing it.

Here, a scrap sticking out of a book, with crossed out calculations on one side

Here too, a pen with its cap missing, left in an empty mug by the sofa.

His hand may be shaking as he writes, but even then, the resemblance is uncanny, the slightly leftward slant of the letters and tight, narrow loops. The spiked, high points and the closed e, the way the letters crowd close to each other.

It could be a photocopy, it’s so similar. Or a very professional forgery, though that doesn’t make sense at all. None of this makes sense, for that matter, and Bond can only read the note in his handwriting, the note that he _knows_ he didn’t write, over and over again.

 

* * *

 

The mirror is just a mirror.

He gets up to check. Of course he does.

The mirror is just a mirror and Bond’s reflection is just that, a man tired eyes, tension stretched across the line of his shoulders.

“I’m going crazy,” he tells the person looking back at him. They speak together, so the insanity must be catching.

 

* * *

 

The best thing to do, Bond decides, would be to not speak about it. Put the piece of paper back where it came from and slip out the door, pretend that he had put food in the bowls and leave it at that, Darcy or whoever this cat really is having returned on his own accord after Bond had left.

What was it though, that Bond had decided that one night? That Bond would never give Q a reason to remember that Q didn’t know him, that Bond would not allow himself to be a stranger?

Bond looks at the note in his hand and wants to laugh, because at this point, Bond isn’t even sure if he knows _himself._

Who is it that Q knows, really?

A forgery would explain the note, but try as he might, Bond can’t quite explain the forgery itself. Bond can’t even explain the cat for that matter, Darcy having abandoned Bond to go pick at the food that Bond has left for him.

But no, wait, one question at a time.

Assuming that Q did forge the note or get someone to do it for him, why go through all the trouble when he knows Bond would write him a dozen letters if need be? And why even use Darcy as a courier of sorts?

Bond thinks he can understand how elaborate certain fantasies can be, but even then, Q hardly seems like the sort who would bother with such trivialities. Unless of course, Bond doesn’t know Q as well as he thinks he does.

Q, with his missing name and untold things.

Q, with his clever mouth and calloused hands.

What does it matter if Bond knows the sound of a laugh or the taste of someone’s lips?

Bond looks at the shut door between them both and realises, belatedly, that he doesn’t know Q at all.

 

* * *

 

The way Bond sees it, things often make more sense in the morning. There’s just something about looking at things in broad daylight that makes most absurdities fall apart, the cold comfort of rationality taking over instead.

Q’s hair is still sleep mussed when he pads into the kitchen, and even if he does startle at Bond sitting at the table, nth mug of coffee in hand, he does a passable job of containing it again, picking Pascal off the other chair so he can take a seat across Bond.

“You spent the whole night here, didn’t you?”

“And good morning to you, too.”

Normality. As if Bond didn’t spend the past six hours alternating between thinking that Q had gone mad, or that _he_ had gone mad himself.

Granted, they’re not exactly the worst six hours he’s ever had – that is reserved for one particular operation a number of years ago, in New Orleans –, but judging from the semi-cautious way Q is regarding him, Bond has to admit that he probably doesn’t look his best.

“Are you going to tell me why it is, exactly, that you’re still here? Or…”

Q trails off as Bond slides the note across the table, face gone quite pale.

Six hours had given Bond more than enough time to run through a number of different scenarios, each one admittedly more dramatic than the last. Waking Q up in the middle of the night to demand an explanation had been an incredibly tempting one for a long while, as with waiting in the living room and asking him outright the moment he stepped through the door, but in the end, Bond had settled on a more visual approach instead.

How did you ask someone about something like this anyways? Best to show, rather than tell, Bond letting the slip of paper lie untouched between the both of them.

“I suppose you want an explanation,” Q says at length. He’s gone ashen, looking more tired than he actually had been the night before.

“The truth would be preferable.”

Seconds stretch the silence out, and with each passing moment, the heavier it becomes, a saturated spectre of a thing. There’s a weight to it that makes Bond think he can near reach out and hold it in his hands, the questions and answers within it a physical, living thing that squirms and shifts, uneasy, under the early morning light.

“I didn’t write this,” Q finally settles hesitantly on. “And before I can tell you who did, it...it would make sense to tell you how it got here in the first place, I think. Did you find it with Pascal or with Darcy?”

“Darcy.”

Which confirms one or two things, at least. That the cat currently curled up at Bond’s feet really is Darcy, and that if Bond has gone mad here, at least he’s not the only one.

“Right,” says Q. “Right, of course. And you saw how he…” A trailing off, as Q tries and fails to find the right words to say.

“No. But he was at the mirror when I found him, so…”

Another confirmation when Q nods. Something to do with the mirror, then, though Bond cannot imagine what it must be. The silence is creeping back, more incessant than ever now that Q seems to have an idea of what he needs to say, but doesn’t seem to know how he should.

He stands, in the end, the scrape of his chair against the kitchen floor unbearably loud in the quiet that has settled in around them.

“Come with me,” he says, and inexplicably pausing to pick up Darcy on the way, Q leads them into the living room. “It’ll be easier to just show you.”

 

* * *

 

The mirror that Q has is a simple thing, just any old full length wall mirror with a solid wood frame that Bond thinks he might have even seen at an IKEA, once, but now that Q is standing in front of it though, Bond might just have to reevaluate his assumptions about the damn thing.

Because as average as the mirror might seem, no normal household item should make Q’s expression soften like that, even more so when there’s nothing to be seen in the reflection except their own selves and the flat behind them.

Sitting himself down on the floor with Bond following suit, Q reaches over to a nearby shelf to pull a notepad over, quickly scribbling a short line on it with the pen that’s clipped to it’s cover.

_send him back immediately, please._

“It’ll make sense,” is all Q says when he catches Bond staring incredulously at the message. He rips the page out with little fanfare. “I swear, it’ll make sense in a moment. Do you still have the ribbon from last night?”

Wordlessly, Bond reaches into his pocket for it, Q plucking it from between Bond’s fingers to quickly tie it around Darcy’s neck and attach the note to it too.

“We tried a collar with him at first–,” Q is saying as he sets Darcy near the mirror, “–but he hated it, so we ended up with this instead. A bit on the archaic side, but it works.”

“We?” echoes Bond a little hollowly. “Who is–…”

The sentence stays unfinished, Bond only able to watch, wide-eyed, as Darcy steps easily past the glass and…away, though common sense would dictate that there’s nowhere for him to go, nothing but a small angle of blank space between the back of the mirror and the wall.

“Cats make it look easy.” Sitting cross-legged next to him, Q has slumped forward, elbow resting on the side of his knee and chin in hand. He’s watching his own reflection, though Bond is nursing a growing suspicion that it’s not all Q sees. “It’s anything but, whenever I do it. Leaves me nauseous for days.”

In retrospect, it’s an immensely stupid idea to touch something that Bond cannot even begin to understand, but when Bond does reach out to press his palm against the glass, its surface is just as hard and unyielding as his experience with mirrors expects it to be. Solid, under his skin. Cold and unmovable.

“I’m hallucinating,” he murmurs as he pulls his hand away. “My god.”

“It’s not a hallucination, believe me.”

“And why should I, when you said that things would make sense?” Turning to Q, all Bond can do is stare at the other man for a moment, just trying to comprehend at least some part of this. “I just watched your _cat_ disappear into a _mirror_ , Q, so tell me, which part of this scenario am I even supposed to associate with any amount of sense?”

Q doesn’t flinch at the accusation, but it’s a near thing, Bond biting the inside of his cheek before he can say anything else.

“I can explain,” he says and when he straightens, it’s to finally turn his attention back to Bond. “Please, just…” Q’s voice is thick, his fingers digging lightly into his thigh. “Just let me try to explain.”

Which is of course the exact moment that Darcy’s paw steps through the mirror, followed so easily by the rest of him, he could have just been walking from one room into the next.

“Go on,” Bond says tiredly after a beat and lets Darcy climb unbidden into his lap with a loud loud _mwowr_ and a new note tied under his chin.

 

* * *

 

The way Q describes it, there isn’t one reality as much as there are realities, plural. Worlds beyond worlds and versions upon versions of each, one place just as real as the next.

“What you just saw Darcy do, I can do too, though with...considerably less ease.”

“But you can’t come back?”

Q shakes his head, a small, almost sad smile pulling at his lips. “One way trip, I’m afraid. Also, I think I should commend you for taking this so well. The last time I did this with someone, she wanted to call the Nightingale Hospital to have someone take me away.”

Following Q’s line of sight, Bond looks down at the note he’s holding in his hand.

_is everything alright?_

It’s in his writing. Taken from a cat that has just walked through a mirror and back. Bond thinks that he’s taking this remarkably well too, but only because the only other viable alternative of him having lost his mind sometime in the middle of last night is not an attractive one.

“It’s a bit of a sad, strange arrangement, really,” Q continues on as he reaches for the notepad again, scribbling something new on it. “Being able to only go forward and look back. Believe me, I’d prefer not being able to look back at all, if I had a choice.”

“So all the business with the mirrors, or lack of, thereof...”

“You noticed?” The pen pauses.

“I guessed.”

A sigh and Q starts writing again, one slightly unsteady line following another. “It’s not all the time, but it is with all mirrors, so I think you can understand how… disconcerting it can be, to sometimes catch glimpses of things and people who aren’t really there.”

“Hence Q branch?”

“Hence Q branch. Everywhere else, it’s not too bad since I don’t know the people, but...” Q shakes his head, pen resting against the page again. “Lets just say I prefer not to go through that at Six. But in any case, here.”

He turns the pen and notepad around, holding out both to Bond who takes them with a small bit of unease.

“I promised your counterpart that I’d let the both of you meet, if something like this ever happened. She might explain things better than I have, given that the both of you…” A vague gesture here, before Q decides to leave it at that.

“My counterpart?” Bond glances down at what Q has already written, a messy scrawl of _everything is fine, he knows, please talk to him_ cobbled together into a loose paragraph. “Wait, what do you mean _she_?”

 

* * *

 

 

> _James,_
> 
> _Your first instinct will be to think this is madness. Unsurprisingly, you’re right; it is. Even I still think it is, after all this time._
> 
> _Let what you think, however, have no bearing on what comes next, because even though I cannot begin to fathom the circumstances under which you found this out, I do know that it will be easier in the long run to take this as what it is – sheer, unadulterated madness._
> 
> _The situation you are in will not make sense._
> 
> _The physics of it will not, either, though Q might occasionally try to force it to._
> 
> _It is another brand of insanity altogether to ask you to accept the reality of this, but for the love of god, James, try. If I can do it sitting at Q’s kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon, so can you. Q tells me that we’re one and the same, after all, and you should know how much we both hate failing._
> 
> _Be kind to him. I let him leave because I chose to believe that in whatever iteration of this, in whatever place he ends up in and with whichever person, we still have the capacity to do so– and more, should you choose to._
> 
> _Do not prove me wrong on the first account, James, because I swear, even if I can’t be there myself, I will find a way to hurt you. Think about how I know you as well as I know myself and understand immediately that I am serious about this._
> 
> _Regards,  
>  Jane._
> 
> _P.S. He’s in love with you, in case you haven’t noticed._
> 
> _P.P.S. I know men can be more flippant about their appearances and (disregarding what Q might say) that we both care little about vanity, but really? Fix your goddamn hair._

 

* * *

 

They’ve migrated back to the kitchen, Bond being of the opinion that if there are revelations to be had, they shouldn’t be arrived at whilst starving.

“So for lack of a better word, you’ve been… travelling?” he asks. With Q’s back turned to him as Q fiddles with the toaster, Bond has been left to his own devices at the table, ending up folding and refolding the piece of paper between his hands for what feels like the hundredth time. “Or is there a better way to put it?”

“Running would be more accurate, but travelling works.”

“And are you going to tell me what it is that you’ve been running from?”

Silence, followed by a shake of Q’s head. Okay. Fine. Bond can work around not having all the answers at one go. It’d taken at least a year before he even got Q to admit he lived with two cats, so it would understandably take more than a few hours for Q to tell Bond what could be a strong enough motivation to make him leave like this, over and over again.

“Can you tell me how long it has been, at least? Or how many times?”

“That I’ve done it, you mean? Five, maybe six, depending on how you’re counting.”

“And every time is...”

“A few years long, but sometimes, some can be longer or shorter than the rest, depending.”

Over the sounds of Q moving around in the kitchen, the shrill, piercing whistle of the kettle coming to a boil on the stove makes everything seem unbearably domestic, the surreality of this conversation tempered with the smell of toasting bread.

“I know I don’t look it,” Q adds as he pulls plates and cupboards, “But at this point, I’m actually a lot closer to your age than you think I am. I might be slightly older even, I think, but it’s not like I’ve actually sat down to count. That’s why Darcy is a bit smaller than you remember him being; it’s like a reset, of sorts, going back to how you were the first time you crossed.”

There’s toast and butter, instant coffee because Q is apparently a lazy heathen who can’t be bothered with actual beans. Bond thinks he would prefer a shot of something much stronger to help ease the topic of conversation along, but whiskey before 8am is a bit of an overkill, even for him.

“Does it... bother you?” Q asks at length, sounding unbearably unsure when Bond still doesn't offer a reply. “It’s a lot to take in, and you...you don’t have to, all at one go. Or even take it in at all, if that’s what you prefer.”

What Bond _would_ prefer is something akin to a neat, sanitised document detailing everything he needs to know about this, all the facts and figures coming together to build a digestible, understandable narrative of Q’s lives up until this very second, but as it stands, all he has is Q, nibbling unenthusiastically at a piece of toast across him.

 _Try_ , his counterpart had said. **Try.**

It’s a Wednesday morning, not a Saturday afternoon, but for all Bond knows, this could have exactly been how Q had done it, half a life ago. Sitting at the kitchen table with her, secrets laid bare and defences slowly cracking. Cooling mugs of coffee between them, the air itself charged with some kind of nervous energy.

In another world, Bond might have gotten up and said You’re right, this is too much.

In another place and time, Bond might have walked out of the door after that and written the past twelve hours off as a fever dream, a disappointing coda to an otherwise promising year.

Here, though, in this moment, Bond weighs fact against reality to finds each wanting, the balance of everything he thought he knew thrown off course and gone all askew.

And yet.

And yet, Bond looks at Q with his hunched shoulders, his still hopeful eyes, and knows that if there’s anything worth trying for in this world, it’s seated right across him at this very table.

Bond tries.

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  **The sixth time** they meet, Q tells himself that he’s done with all the running. Done sprinting away from disappointments and done chasing down ideals, because even if it’s agonising, more painful than anything Q thinks he can live through again, Q doesn’t have it in him anymore, to be afraid. To be so hopeful, even.
> 
> It’s unfair that he makes it so easy, though. Tempting and almost effortless, with the calls and meals, the way he seems to _want_ Q to catch him looking Q’s way.
> 
> Coming from someone that used to be an unattainable constant in all of Q’s lives, it’s confusing.
> 
> Where is the catch?
> 
> What will be the price, this time around?
> 
> Q had glimpsed an estimate that night, pressed against him for the first time and wanting it so badly to be okay. An empty apartment can mean many things, but Q knows loss when he sees it, has abandoned enough things and people to read traces of it in the layers of dust and empty spaces.
> 
> “It’s okay,” he says in the end and Q leaves, because it’s the easier thing to do. Walking away isn’t the same as an escape or a pursuit, Q had said he wouldn’t be running anymore and Q always keeps his promises, but here’s the thing – Q hadn’t counted on being followed.
> 
> “Did she tell you that she actually threatened me that first time? A fate worse than death and all of that.” Bond has his feet on Q’s coffee table and Q, too sleepy by half, can’t even find it in himself to care for once. “Threats like that are genuinely terrifying when you realise someone out there really does know your deepest, darkest fears.”
> 
> “So the equivalent of the ‘break his heart, I’ll break your legs’ speech? No. Many requests for a video of us in bed or some nonsense of equal horror, but no, no admissions of that sort.” Shifting his head in Bond’s lap, Q stifles a yawn. “I can’t imagine what she could do to you, though, from there.”
> 
> “I know myself. There’s a lot I can do, trust me.”
> 
> “Well thank god there’s an impenetrable barrier between the both of you.”
> 
> “Should I be flattered that you care so much about my wellbeing?”
> 
> Q snorts, the act startling Pascal who had been lying on his chest.
> 
> “Concerned for my own sanity, more like,” he says, flippant. “Just the thought of the two of you together is enough to make me find a good sized mirror and leave all over again.”
> 
> When Bond takes longer than usual to reply, Q cracks one eye open, blinking up at him.
> 
> “Bond?”
> 
> There’s an indecipherable look on Bond’s face, but just from the way he holds himself, muscles just that much tighter, Q can hazard a guess at what it means.
> 
> “I know you were joking–,” Bond finally says, “–but admittedly, it’s…” He shifts then, obviously uncomfortable, and Q can’t remember the last time he actually saw Bond like this. “It’s something I think about, sometimes.”
> 
> Even if they’ve gone over each and every part of Q’s past lives before this, the idea of anything that may after has just never come up, Q only maintaining it that way because it’s not something he has even ever considered.
> 
> “Bond–”
> 
> “That said, it’s not like I think I’m in any position at all to tell you to stay, if you don’t want–”
> 
> Reaching up for Bond’s shirt collar, Q simply pulls Bond down towards him, only needing to lift his head a fraction to meet Bond halfway.
> 
> “I’m not leaving,” he says, quiet and more than a little serious against Bond’s mouth. “You asked me once, what I was running from, but the thing is, I’ve always been running towards someone instead.”
> 
> “And did you find him?”
> 
> Q would let go, but in the warm light of Q’s flat, Bond is starting to smile, a slow, sure thing that only makes Q want to kiss him again.
> 
> “You know the answer, so you know I’m not leaving again. Not ever.”
> 
> This is the catch.
> 
> This is the price, the true cost, and Q will do all he can to keep paying it.

**Author's Note:**

> At least 70% of this was written in a caffeine-induced haze of panic over the course of five days, between the hours of 10pm-3am, so that...really should explain most of it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [reflection](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5833894) by [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/pseuds/beili)




End file.
